PRESS RELEASE:

Franz Liszt did not have to plug his piano into the wall...

For two centuries the little old piano makers tinkered to increase the loudness of the Piano.  Every improvement or modification to a piano is designed to do four things:

1. Increase it’s loudness (the most important) by tapering the soundboard, fitting the rim, increasing string tension, increasing hammer force  etc. etc. etc.

2. Smooth it’s response (loudness) across the keyboard so the notes are all about the same loudness according to the human ear that responds logarithmically to variations in sound pressure.  This is quite dependent on the “scale” of the piano.

3. Improve the feel and responsiveness and evenness of the keyboard interface with the player.  

4. Reduce spurious sounds, buzzes, rings, unwanted sounds and (undefined by the little old piano-makers), intermodulation, harmonic distortion and heterodyne aliasing.  Distortion makes the piano sound “Muddy”.

A traditional Acoustic Piano is a series of 88 mechanical amplifiers.  The only energy introduced into the Piano is the force applied to a key by the players finger.  The goal is to make that “finger force” result in as much loudness as possible.  But the limit of the "loudness" equation is the negligible amount of energy generated when a key is struck.  

To make the key-striking force create more sound energy the piano structure is used to create “resonance” at or near the frequency of each of 88 or so keys.  Ideally each of 88 notes would resonate some part of the piano structure evenly.  Thus equal loudness (sound pressure) would result from striking each of the keys.

Because low (bass) notes require more energy to sound as loud as higher notes, a larger and larger percentage of the piano structure must be created to create low notes. Similarly in an electronic sound system, a sub-woofer may need 100 watts to sound as loud as a tweeter consuming 1 watt.

To reproduce low bass notes with a piano is very difficult and very expensive. And until now these efforts just made the piano very big.  Simply put, large things resonate at lower frequencies than small things

The new patent for the Nicholas Piano simply jumps the acoustic amplifier limitation by introducing a new source of energy (electricity) to bolster the keystrike energy in the creation of the piano sound pressure (electricity).  The Nicholas Piano patent “essentially” creates 88 individually tunable amplifiers with individually adjustable loudness gains to reduce the dependence on mechanical resonances to create loudness (sound pressure).  

The Nicholas Piano (NP) also does a couple of other things very well.  The NP smoothes the response across the keyboard.  The NP vastly reduces the amount of distortion created in the traditional acoustic piano system.  As a result the NP is much less “muddy” when played.  The sound is clearer and more distinct. The NP also introduces the "stretched harmonic" timbre which is created by very long strings, it is these strings that are missing in shorter pianos.

All, Repeat All accomplished pianists who have compared the Nicholas Piano to a traditional 9foot concert grand have preferred the NP. Their subjective comments were that the NP was louder, clearer and less muddy.   Some artists even said that it gave them goose bumps and made them search for the “rest” of the piano. 

 The standard Nicholas Piano is a 5 foot grand.  It’s a lot of fun to play.  Try it.