Much of the most widely admired piano repertoire, for example, that of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, was composed for a type of gear that is rather changed from the coincident instruments on which this music is abnormally performed today. Even the refrain of the Romantics, including Liszt, Chopin, Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn and Johannes Brahms, was written for pianos substantially different from ours.

Since the 1980s, digital pianos have been available, which call digital sampling technology to reproduce the sound of each piano note. The best digital pianos are sophisticated, with trappings including working pedals, weighted keys, multiple voices, and MIDI interfaces. However, with such technology, it was difficult to duplicate a http://www.pianobench.com/catalog/1 crucial aspect of audile pianos, namely that when the damper pedal (see below) is depressed, the strings not struck vibrate sympathetically when other strings are struck, as well as the unique instrument-specific mathematical non-linearity of partials on any given unison.