What piano is the best piano?

Answer 1

Any answere to this question essentialy contaning the name of the "best" piano the is claimed to be fact is merely the opinion of a person who is ignerant to a great degree, being any given answere is a product of the posters point of view, preferance, preferance of there informer, and of course there are many other contributing factors. So many I am unable to list all of them.

The following is a list of piano manufacturers who are widely considered to be some of the finest,

Steinway & Sons, Bosendorfer, Bechstein, Yamaha, Erard (no longer in function), and Pleyel.
Which piano brand is the best piano brand is defined mostly by matter of personal taste.

To define "the best" you should first list the qualities in which a piano brand could excel or diverse. In general those are:

• the materials used (durability / friction / easy acces for replacement of the parts)

• acoustic / scale design (this will influence the tone / voice of the piano)

• mechanical design (dimensional shapes, ratio, and weight calibrations in both action and keyboard that will influence the touch of the piano)

• casing / artwork / design (to many pianists this is the least important one)

Both the voicing and the regulation of a piano afterwards (at home, in the shop, or on stage) will determine wether the piano makes use of it's full potention, and will be able to tweak the sound and the touch of a piano a little towards an individual pianists taste.

When looking at the above there are some brands known to manufacture piano's of very high quality materials, with a carefully calibrated and designed action and keyboard, that possess more potential than some of the other piano's out there, and that are generally considered to be top-class-brands (for what that's worth)

Here I would like to specifically mention some of them:

Of course there is Steinway, but bear in mind that there is a difference between piano's manufactured by the Hamburg Steinway factory and the New York Steinway factory, in favour of the german one.

Also one of my personal favourites and considered to manufacture unprecedented piano's is Fazioli. (It's a relatively young Italian brand)

And than there is Grotrian Steinweg, also from Germany, which is known to manufacture highly appreciated piano's for centuries now, and was started by one of the Steinweg brothers (the other one went to the US and changed his name to Steinway)

Bösendorfer and Yamaha should probably also be mentioned here, along with maybe few others.

There are and have been many other good quality brands, and also the above mentioned brands are and have been producing various sub-brand piano's that vary in quality but some are quite good!

You should also remember that a brands quality may vary over time, when factories get taken over by different companies, or a different management, or when (partial) manufacturing is outsourced to other countries and factories.

In the end choosing your own perfect piano all comes down to listening and playing and than, after narrowing down your selection, calling an independent pianotechnician to join you and inspect the instruments you're interested in.

Answer 2

In order of quality...

Steinway

Baldwin

Bluthner

Boston

Charles Walters

Yamaha