Why not the piano as a reference for bass

Thank you, @mahgister!  Very glad to hear Seth Kaufman's music speaks to you too! 

@billstevenson 

Looking at Yamaha's website, it seems at least some Clavinova electronic pianos use actual recordings of single piano notes, played at varying intensities.  The actual recordings are taken from a Bosendorfer and a Yamaha Concert Grand.

During play, the notes are mixed and reverberations from the other strings are calculated, along with reverberations from the soundboard and the body of the piano.  For headphone output, this is done in stereo.

Yamaha has been a leader in digital signal processing with its AV Receivers, and its NS-5000 speaker family has been a classic for decades.  Not to mention motorbikes and jet-skis

I am a professional pianist/ organist, and was an agent for Bosendorfer piano many years ago. I use the 97 key Imperial at my church, and have my favorite Bosendorfer 7 foot, 4 inch model at home. The lowest notes on the Imperial contain so little fundamental frequency energy, that even the most skilled piano technicians are very challenged to tune those pitches properly! The reason for the extra nine notes was for scaling and tone. Strings close to the rim do not resonate as well because the soundboard best resonates in the middle area. This is true of any vibrating membrane on any musical instrument! On the Imperial Grand, now the string of the lowest A on a regular piano crosses almost down the middle of the soundboard, creating its beautiful singing quality with almost organ like sustain! On a Steinway, one can achieve power, but with much quicker attenuation than the Bosendorfer, because the string is much closer to the rim. BUT, there still is no comparison to an organ pipe as a bass reference because of the sheer physics of the pipe itself, creating the true fundamental bass frequency! So yes, the piano is a great instrument for testing speaker accuracy, but for a variety of other reasons, not for bass! And no, I’ve never heard a speaker sound like a live Bosendorfer, but the closer they can get is a great evaluation tool for quality audio reproduction. 

Each piano varies in tonality. But I’d argue that despite piano’s being a so called percussive instrument acoustic piano’s ring with overtones that no bass can match. And no digital piano can match the overtones of an acoustic piano. 

While I can agree that no speaker system can fully capture the sound of an acoustic piano, at least within the context of what I have heard from sound systems, Yamaha has carved out something different with their top level Clavinova instruments.  These are not trying to reproduce the sound of a piano recording in the context that is normally contemplated.  Rather they were conceived to produce (as opposed to reproduce) the sound of a piano.  I have heard the result compared to Yamaha's C7 and C9 and the result is remarkable.  How a Bosendorfer would compare I cannot say.  The standard was Yamaha, not Bosendorfer, so presumably the difference would be obvious.