I need help with a piano system

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That is all very vague.

What does he feel needs upgrading? How does the existing speaker system fall short in his view? We need to know what problem we are solving before we can solve it.

If I needed more speaker for something like this, I would look into amplified speakers. Yamaha makes several, as do most speaker makers these days. Amplified speakers in nice wood grain cabinets would look better with the piano than would the molded plastic kind.
 
Electric piano internal sound systems sound like ****.
It's not the sound generator, it is the amps & speakers. Try it on headphones, they are often quite pleasing. 5" drivers don't make much bass.
I find amps below 120 W music power/ch won't reproduce the impact of the hammer on the strings. That's with a 101 db 1W1m speakers. Less efficiency needs more power. My main amp is 60 W/ch rms but 70 v rail gives plenty of peak power for the milliseconds of a hammer hit.
The only system I've heard that comes close is my SP2XT Peavey with various amps, currently a CS800s. Current design SP2 is great too. These are horn + 15" woofer. Look for a speaker that is flat +- 3 db down to 54 hz. A0 is that low. And 2nd harmonic distortion below 20 db all frequencies @ 1 W doesn't hurt a bit.
My hearing stops at 14000 hz, so the top frequency limit of the Peavey's doesn't bother me. People with really undamaged hearing might hear more on the top octave notes with 20000 hz. Yamaha makes a 15" woofer + horn speaker, I've never heard it. JBL does too, I've never heard those either. The dealer with a demo room in this town is the Peavey dealer. He sells Bose too, which I don't like on piano.
Room arrangement matters. My speakers are on poles high above one end of a room shaped like Wein Philharmonia hall. SP2 project highs down from above. Bookshelves, carpet, polyurethane furniture & wood organs break up the standing waves.
BTW, playing piano CD's is a great way to test speakers. almost none of them can do it. I have a wood piano calibrator right in my music room for reference. Most people's hearing is worse than mine, and they can't tell the difference.
 
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Electric piano internal sound systems sound like ****.
It's not the sound generator, it is the amps & speakers. Try it on headphones, they are often quite pleasing. 5" drivers don't make much bass.
I find amps below 120 W music power/ch won't reproduce the impact of the hammer on the strings. That's with a 101 db 1W1m speakers. Less efficiency needs more power. My main amp is 60 W/ch rms but 70 v rail gives plenty of peak power for the milliseconds of a hammer hit.
The only system I've heard that comes close is my SP2XT Peavey with various amps, currently a CS800s. Current design SP2 is great too. These are horn + 15" woofer. Look for a speaker that is flat +- 3 db down to 54 hz. A0 is that low. And 2nd harmonic distortion below 20 db all frequencies @ 1 W doesn't hurt a bit.
My hearing stops at 14000 hz, so the top frequency limit of the Peavey's doesn't bother me. People with really undamaged hearing might hear more on the top octave notes with 20000 hz. Yamaha makes a 15" woofer + horn speaker, I've never heard it. JBL does too, I've never heard those either. The dealer with a demo room in this town is the Peavey dealer. He sells Bose too, which I don't like on piano.
Room arrangement matters. My speakers are on poles high above one end of a room shaped like Wein Philharmonia hall. SP2 project highs down from above. Bookshelves, carpet, polyurethane furniture & wood organs break up the standing waves.
BTW, playing piano CD's is a great way to test speakers. almost none of them can do it. I have a wood piano calibrator right in my music room for reference. Most people's hearing is worse than mine, and they can't tell the difference.

I partly disagree with this, even though I agree that the main weakness of digital pianos is the speaker system, not the samples. But you need to spend some bucks in order to get digital pianos that sound and feel more or less like pianos. First of all, they need to have a proper cabinet, just like speakers do. And amnplification and drivers need to be good of course.

The best in class, IMO, is the Yamaha Avantgrand N2. Very expensive though. Next in line is the Kawai CS11 and CS10. I have the CS10. They utilize an actual soundboard of wood which transmits sound, in addition to speakers on the top. This makes it sound and feel much more natural than most other digital pianos, since the whole cabinet is producing sound and transmitting vibrations, just like with an acoustic piano. When I jam on my CS10, the impact is there, and the bass travels all the way down to my neighbors.

Can it compare to a decent grand piano? No way. Not Even close. Can it compare to acoustic uprights of mediocre quality? Yes. I prefer playing on my Cs10 compared to many uprights Ive tried.

So, my point is that digital piano makers are able to pull it off, when they put their resources into it.

Ive never tried the Disklavier models though, so I dont know what the room for improvement is, and what might be missing.
 
Seems like the Disklavier E3 is a hybrid piano. So, (s)he needs to hear the sound from the source other than the built-in speakers? Presumably, the integral speakers are playing exactly what the electronic sound engine is producing?

Anyway, indianajo is correct about the speakers being the limiting factor. Specifically, the problem is power compression. Ordinary hi-fi speakers won't cut it. I would suggest looking to pro gear (which I don't know much about).
In the hi-fi realm, the speaker with surreal (because no normal speaker sounds like it) dynamics is this Avantgarde system (see pic)

b2.jpg


and the other very dynamic speaker (but sounding more "real") is Vivid Audio Giya (G1ya) (below). There is a later, even better flagship.

vivid_giya_group.jpg
 

Yap. Seems like an impressive piece of engineering.
Back to the OPs question. I would hasard a guess that its difficult to implement new speakers in a piano such as this, assuming one talks about the built in speakers. When piano makers make pianos like this, they try to position the speakers in such a way inside the piano so that the dispersion pattern becomes as similar as possible to the sound dispersion of a real grand piano. Can it be as good as the real thing, no. But it can do a pretty good job, I would guess.

I assume that Yamaha has employed quite some DSP and engineering when designing this piano. In order to change speakers, one would need to make sure that the new speakers spread the sound in the same way as the old speakers, and that their relative level and volume stays the same. Means that the sensitivity of the drivers must be the same - relative to the other drivers, and that the dispersion pattern of the drivers is similar. Etc. In other words, a difficult feat to pull off.
 
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Lots of whiz bang words from the clone pushers. Come into my music room & hear some real sound. My system drives the room, not some little performance space. People play these grand looking devices on stage, but the line level feed goes to the venue PA system. My system is the house PA.
It is not cheap. I paid $1000 for pro PA equpment, the amp needed repair. A new CS600s amp +2 SP2 speakers + stands + 12 ga cables was over $2300 6 years ago when I bought. You can get a good fifties Baldwin Acrosonic, Sohmer, or high end Wurlitzer console piano for $450 delivered & tuned in my area, but people love their toys to be new.
 
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Best amp/speaker I've heard coming close to a convincing piano sound is from a Leslie. A rotary speaker intended for use with organs such as Hammonds. The slow setting on say a Leslie 147 or 145. Route a good quality piano emulation through a Leslie, close your eyes and be amazed.......

Sound disperses in a room much the same way as a real piano does, including very subtle detuning and sense of space that comes from real pianos. For stage use that's pretty loud by itself, but with the Leslie cabinet mic'd up and through a PA it's also very convincing...........

Fairly off the wall though..........

LD
 
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