A new hybrid piano combines the best of a digital piano with a concert grand acoustic piano. NY1's Technology reporter Adam Balkin filed the following report.

Yamaha's soon-to-be-released Avant Grand, a hybrid grand piano, has been designed to sound almost the same as a nine-foot acoustic grand, at half its size and about a third of the weight.

"When you're sitting in front of a piano, especially a grand piano, the sound isn't coming to you in stereo, it's coming from all over the
place and there's also depth to the sound," says Mark Anderson of Yamaha. "We sampled in four places, so if you look at the speakers they're about where we took the sampling and beyond that there's also a resonator. It's making it sound omnidirectional from there, so the sound doesn't appear to becoming from any one place."

Developers were also able to replicate the feel of an actual acoustic piano. When a player hits the keys, a hammer strikes a bar in back just like an acoustic's hammers hit strings. The whole piano vibrates under hand just as a real one would, and even the pedal replicates the increased tension felt when it's pressed harder on an acoustic.

"On the pedal it's mechanical to duplicate that, and for the feeling in
the hands and running through the body there is a tactile response
system built inside, basically creating vibration under the keyboard," says Anderson.

Pianist Matthew Cameron, who is not paid by Yamaha but does call himself a "Yamaha artist," gave NY1 his first impressions after sitting down at the Avant Grand piano for the very first time.

"It's much better than I expected actually," says Cameron. "The first thing I always notice when I'm playing an electrical piano is it lacks a certain pedal nuance that I found here. and it's got a nice color. It's very responsive."

The Avant Grand goes on sale this summer for $20,000, about one-fifth the price of a real grand piano. One can also save a few bucks every few years, since the piano never has to be tuned.