Why not the piano as a reference for bass

@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.

With all due respect to billstevenson, there have been so many attempts for decades to come up with a substitute for the acoustic piano that doesn’t need tuning, etc., and Yamaha has been at the forefront with their hybrid, Clavinova, and other models. Yes, they have made improvements in the sampled piano, but it is still a canned sound, not an acoustic instrument. As in a sampled electronic pipe organ, despite the increased resolution, etc., there is still no way to recreate the multiplicity of so many sound sources, no matter how many audio channels and samples are used to create the random complexity of the acoustic instrument. A professional musician can tell you that you can take the highest quality string samples for instance, and that in a simple example may sound good, as soon as you layer more and more, the result homogenizes and sounds less convincing. But if for example, you keep adding more acoustic string instruments, the sound gets more and more complex, and is easily recognized as far superior to the canned samples. It has to do with the infinite number of variables in individual bowings, vibratos, intonation, and many other factors. Also, we are trying to convert this enormous complexity into an electronic signal, reproduced by audio transducers. The fact is that we’re conditioned to believe that the sample is the real deal in live performance, Broadway shows, and recordings. I maintain that I can take a child and sit them in front of a real cello, and there will be no question of how they will respond to the physical affect of that instrument as opposed to a recorded sample.