Features

Wood is denser and heavier than plastic, and it moves differently under your fingers. A wooden key has more inertia, so it settles rather than clatters, and it stays stable as the room warms and cools.

Worth clearing up: wooden keys and key tops are different things. Every Clavinova has synthetic ebony and ivory keytops, the textured surface you actually touch. The wood is the key itself, underneath.

Wooden keys are a step-up feature inside every series, not a marker of one series. The entry model of each family has synthetic keys.

This is the spec nobody explains, so here it is. A key has to be heavy enough to feel substantial, but that same weight fights you when you play very softly or very fast.

Counterweights solve it. A weight is set into the key to balance the hammer mechanism, so the key returns to rest more readily. Pianissimo passages become easier to control, and rapid repeated notes stop wearing your hand out. Concert grands have done this for a century.

You will not see it, and you may not consciously notice it. You will notice that the piano stops arguing with you in the quiet passages.

On an acoustic piano the hammers get gradually lighter as you move up the keyboard. Cheaper digital pianos fake this by splitting the keyboard into three or four zones, so the weight jumps as you cross a boundary.

Linear grading gives all eighty-eight keys their own individually specified weight. Run your hand up the keyboard and the change is continuous, the way it is on a real instrument.

Anyone who has practiced in headphones knows the problem. The sound arrives flat and pressed against your ears, and after an hour it is exhausting.

Yamaha recorded these pianos using microphones placed where a player's ears would actually be. Put the headphones on and the instrument opens out in front of you, with depth and space, the way it does when you are sitting at it.

If you are buying this piano so the family can sleep while you play, this is the feature that decides whether you enjoy it.

Press the sustain pedal on an acoustic piano and every damper lifts. Now every string in the instrument is free to vibrate in sympathy with whatever you play. That wash of resonance is a huge part of why a real piano sounds alive.

VRM calculates that interaction as you play, in real time, rather than playing back a fixed recording. Hold a chord, pedal into it, and the sound keeps evolving.

On a real piano, two notes at identical volume can sound completely different depending on how you got there. A sharp attack bites. A slow, weighted press blooms. Pianists spend years learning to control this, and most digital pianos throw it away, reducing everything to one number for how hard you hit the key.

Grand Expression Modeling listens to the whole gesture. It is the difference between an instrument that responds and one that merely plays back.

A concert technician spends hours adjusting a piano for a hall. Piano Room hands you the same controls.

Open or close the virtual lid to brighten or soften the tone. Move the instrument from an intimate room to a recital hall. Adjust string resonance, damper behavior and touch response until it sits right under your hands.

It sounds like a gimmick until you use it. Then it is the first thing you set up on a new piano.

This is the feature that turns a piano into a one-person band, and it is the single biggest reason people choose a CVP.

Pick a style: bossa nova, gospel, big band, country. Play a chord. Drums, bass, guitar and horns come in behind you and follow your changes. They will play an intro, drop into a fill when you ask, take a variation, and end cleanly on cue. You are conducting, not playing along to a backing track.

The CLP has a small set of simple rhythms. The CVP and CSP have hundreds of full arrangements.

Yamaha uses two names for this, which causes no end of confusion. On the CVP they are called guide lamps. On the CSP they are called Stream Lights and take the form of tall LED columns that show the note falling toward the key, so you can see it coming.

Either way the idea is the same. Choose a song, and the keyboard tells you where to put your hands. Set it to wait, and it will hold until you play the right note rather than leaving you behind.

It is the closest thing to a patient teacher who never sighs at you. The CLP does not have this.

With over a thousand sounds and hundreds of styles on board, you need a way in. The CVP puts a color touchscreen right on the instrument, up to nine inches, and everything is a tap away.

This is the fork in the road between the CVP and the CSP. The CVP puts the screen on the piano. The CSP deliberately leaves it off, keeping the instrument clean, and runs everything from your iPad instead. Neither is better. It is a question of whether you want the technology visible or invisible.

Connect a tablet and every setting on the instrument appears in front of you, laid out properly instead of buried in a menu.

The part people do not expect: Audio to Score. Point it at a song in your music library and it will work out the chords and produce a playable chord chart or piano score. A song you have loved for twenty years becomes something you can sit down and play.

It works with every Clavinova. On the CSP it is not an accessory, it is the entire control surface.