Hi everyone

One of my friends is thinking of getting a piano and starting lessons. At the moment she is looking at the Yamaha BS 1 silent piano. I just wondered if anyone had any knowledge of these and what you think of them. Do they have to be tuned? I notice from looking at it on the internet that you can turn off the acoustic sound and then hear it as a digital through headphones. Does that sort of mechanism make it more prone to have mechanical defaults? Any thoughts would be very much appreciated. Thanks very much. The reason she is not getting a traditional acoustic - I don't know if I am using the right term - is because of the usual neighbour difficulties those of us playing instruments can sometimes have.

Silent piano? o_O
Haven't heard of that before, but I've tried many digital pianos and they all seem quite good. All the modern shiny swanky ones seem to have fully-weighted keys, so it doesn't feel much different from a proper piano. The sound never fully convinces me, though

Neighbour problems? Tell me about it! My piano has been stuffed at the back with a duvet, and a towel in the little gap under the keyboard, to stop the neighbours complaning :|

I don't know much about so called 'silent pianos', but I have a Yamaha CLP970 digital piano (new 5 years ago and now superceded by the 370?). All I have to do to make it silent is plug the earphones into the socket provided. I can then play at any volume, in the middle of the night if the mood takes me, without disturbing the adjacent flats. The weighted keys have a very realistic feel and, touch wood, I have not had any problems. I tried the latest 370 recently and it felt exactly the same, although the sound was marginally better thanks to a different speaker arrangement. Hope this helps.

This is a recurring question that has been touched on in many threads - most comprehensively in this one.

And yes, you still have to have the acoustic part of the instrument tuned. If you use the silent system a lot your tuning will be less, and the felts and dampers will show less wear, but the rest of the key and escapement mechanism will wear at normal rates - neither more nor less prone to defects than a regular acoustic instrument.

Thanks. I realised that there had been discussions about digital pianos and keyboards before but had not appreciated that the silent pianos came under that category. My friend described it as a piano.

I have tried a Yamaha U1 silent piano, which is 15 to 20% more expensive than a normal Yamaha U1 (without the silent feature).

It is still a real piano. There are strings and hammers and everything you find in an acoustic piano are present. But when you turn it to "silent", it starts to work like a digital piano in functionality. You can switch voices (with a combination of keys depressed), turn the volume up and down etc. The salesman showed me the mechanism that stops the hammers from hitting the strings, and instead translates the force on each key into digital signals, which eventually generate the sounds you hear in the headphone.

To me, it is a real piano with a Yamaha Clavinova installation. As for the feel of the piano, I actually felt that the silent piano had slightly heavier keys. But again, that could be because each piano differs slightly from the other.

Sigh, if I didn't have a Clavinova already, I would have bought the U1 silent ....

I bought a yamaha silent U1 piano last year and I love it. It's basically an acoustic piano with a silent option; you shift the middle pedal to the side for the silent version which is brilliant if you live in a flat. In addition, the U1 silent version also has the option of recording your playing which is handy for practise.

Thanks. I will be able to tell my friend your comments.