MacMacMac The content of that video is questionable.
The video (and the corresponding website) is very militant. I think this is inevitable when one thinks they have something important in their hands
MacMacMac I think the material was pulled from thin air.
There is certainly lots of bragging. On the other hand (pun intended), it solves a real problem which is particularly sore for women. The company/foundation was born out of people who did something similar already for themselves and were asked by friends. Once you have something like that, you want to leverage some economy of scale, and for lack of a marketing department and a dedicated research division, the DIY advertisenent-which-you-don-t-want-to-look-as-such causes that sloppiness in statements, that you are so harshly criticizing.
This thing has never caught up because it's very expensive for what it offers (on top of the already expensive acoustic piano) and because piano teachers are skeptical about it. Since one of my daughters is both a pianist and a violinist, I have a particular view about it. Violinists start on tiny instruments and swap them with larger ones as they grow, potentially arriving to "full size" (quoted because there isn't such a thing, sizes vary a bit from one instrument to the next). Some players with smaller hands, even professional ones, stay with something smaller than "full size", even though the smaller instruments produce not-as-good-as-the-largest-ones sound. Nothing like that in piano, which I think would be very useful (as a kid my daughter complained with me forever that she could never reach an octave, and still now she laments that it's a large stretch for her). I suspect the skepticism from the piano teachers is unfounded, but given that there isn't experience out there, I see how people tend to be conservative.
The few professionals with smaller hands that I've seen testing this reduced size keyboard, liked it. They claim one can adjust between large and small keyboards with no problem (people did that already between clavichords and harpsichord back in the day). Obviously with the limitation that in the large keyboards they can't do everything they do on the small one. That causes the famous chicken-and-egg problem with concert venues, on top of many other problems that concert artists have (for both, see the PW pianist subforum where such conversations are happening right now).
I agree that one has to make compromises, and if that's what you mean, fine. On the other hand, your whole post sounds to me like simply an "I don't care about change or progress" which is something I totally disagree with.
In my case, I can reach an octave ok and with some effort and stretch even a nineth, but only for some combinations (e.g. white-to-white). The mythical tenth is out of reach, which is a shame, since the interval of a tenth has such a beautiful sound and rolling it doesn't not make it for me. Given that, and my daughter's difficulty with an octave, which arguably is an essential interval to be able to reach on the piano, I did seriously look at the option of purchasing one of these.
In the end I did not for one reason. Well, price played a role, since I would have been quite outside of my budget and I would have renounced to many other things to be able to afford it, but if it were cheaper/used I would have bought it anyway just for my daughter. The problem is the space in between black keys, and the width of black keys themselves. Both of these are reduced proportionally compared to "regular" (again, there is no such thing, all pianos are slight different, go to PW technician forum if you don't believe me). I have a two-octave 3D-printed dummy of the largest of the reduced size. The black keys are thin and feel like one can slip off too easily; I guess I'd grow used to that, but this is important for what comes next. My fingers do not fit in between the black keys (my daughter's fingers do). You can request thinner black keys (from the even smaller reduced size ones), but I would not go with even thinner black keys. Hence, no purchase.
Now, if this were a $500 or so digital, I'd surely have bought it. If it were a several-thousand standalone one which would have a used market value if we decided we did not want it, I would have considered it very seriously. But for a several-thousands, custom-made-to-fit my own grand piano (hence with zero resale value), it's a stretch of my budget that I am not making. I guess if I win the lottery (I don't even purchase tickets, but the chances are more or less the same š¤£), and I satisfy all my other wishes and get plenty of spare money, I'd buy it. In fact, I even thought of building it myself, but then decided that the Mybrid/Cybrid was such a better project.
