Josh's Not-a-Blog

Starbucks sucks. Cf. Dave's Ravings, or ask a waitress at The Library ("We proudly serve Starbucks coffee.").

Today I took shipment of my new Kawai MP9500 digital stage piano. Ninety-five pounds of pure wooden-action digitally-sampled fun. After lugging the beast into place atop my shiny new Quik-Lok industrial-strength piano stand, I fired up the MP9500.

Awesome. Well, except for one thing. Actually, 22 things. Each E-flat, G, and B failed to sound. Everything else works fine. But, as you can understand, that's just not good enough.

So, as any good geek would do, I consulted Google. Google didn't know much about resetting a Kawai MP9500. Well, at least not in English. I did find German firmware (version 1.1), and revision changelogs in various other languages, but it seems that no one else has had a problem with an MP9500. I guess they had to ship a bad one sooner or later.

After an exhaustive (or at least exhausting) web search, I broke down and read the manual. Oh, that's how you reset the piano. Easy enough. But alas, still no joy. Hmm. I sent a friendly message to Kawai technical support (technical support for a piano manufacturer?), but I don't suppose there's anyone checking the trouble ticket queue at midnight EST.

So I got to thinking how strange this situation really is. Who would have thought that a device meant to imitate an acoustic instrument invented nearly 300 years ago would have a "bug", a condition that didn't exist until the shortly after invention of the modern digital computer? As a weary system administrator just looking for a little recreation, I'm not at all eager to troubleshoot these types of problems on my piano. As unrealistic as having an actual, real-life acoustic piano is, maybe I could have figured out a way. At least I'd probably have E-flats, Gs, and Bs.