YAMAHA N3X Avant-grand Hybrid Piano With Bench

Yamaha N3X

Feel and experience a piano sound that you have never had before from this stunning and elegant instrument

Touch, pedal feel, reverberation, and resonance—by all metrics, the N3X meets or surpasses the demands of even the most discriminating pianist. The N3X uses a specialized sample set to provide an extremely responsive and natural playing experience. Bright, smooth, and dynamic—this is the ultimate AvantGrand.

• Specialized Grand Piano Action with Ivorite®
• Spatial Acoustic Sampling
• Sound sampled on four channels from the Yamaha CFX and Bösendorfer Imperial
• Yamaha CFX Binaural sampling
• Virtual Resonance Modeling (VRM)
• Spatial Acoustic Speaker System
• Soundboard Resonator
• Tactile Response System
• Specialized Grand Piano Pedal
• USB Audio Recorder
• XLR jack outputs

Concept

A real grand piano that you can play anywhere, anytime. The AvantGrand series features the same action used in Yamaha's renowned grand pianos, combined with cutting-edge technology that allows you to experience grand piano performance at any volume. Whether it's the compact N1 with it's authentic grand piano feel, the sleek style of the N2, or the outstanding power and playability of the N3X, the AvantGrand series offers the genuine experience of playing a grand piano, wherever, and whenever you need it.

A message to Pianists

When do you, as a pianist, feel elation? Is it in that instant when you see a score for the first time, and feel the inspirations of the composer bloom inside your mind?

It might be when you're up on stage playing a grand piano that projects every aspect of your sound, bathed in a shower of applause from an appreciative audience.
Call it accomplishment, call it exultation - we're certain that you've experienced your share of such moments.
But above all, there is that incomparable joy you feel in those moments when you sit at your piano.
Those instants when, threading the fragments of your imagination together as sound, you become at one with the instrument; those treasured moments of delight for all who love the piano, regardless of their skill or experience.
It's why we believe that you can spend so much of your life in front of the piano.

At Yamaha, our desire is to craft pianos that bring a little more of this joy to as many people as possible.
This is a treasured ideal that we have long held dear and one we have now transformed into a new piano.
Meditating on those hours of happiness, those indescribable moments of joy experienced at a piano, we decided to do our best to respond to your desires and aspirations for this instrument.
AvantGrand. A new identity for the piano, born from the fusion of twenty-first century technology and more than a century of piano-crafting experience.
The blissful moment when you and the piano resonate as one.... is here.

Playing the piano - freeing the pianist of all limitations.

And then, the joy of transforming the act of playing into something new...
To play when you want, how you want, as much as you want.
For those that love the piano, this is an extravagance above all else, something that all pianists yearn for.
In reality playing the piano brings with it many limits.
Beyond the physical issues of time to play and a place for the instrument, there are the fine nuances, particularly with the grand piano, of touch, tone, and reverberation, that contribute to the true thrill of playing the piano.

At Yamaha, we hope to offer the best sound we can to as many people as possible.
We have held this goal unchanged throughout our history of over a century of piano making.
Together with the know-how and inspiration gleaned from each new experience, along with the new technologies that have emerged over the years, this goal has taken us closer to our pictured ideal and seen with it the manufacture of a multitude of different pianos.
So what features does a piano have that make it essential in the lives of you, the people who possess both an unreserved love for playing the piano and an awareness of its essential excellence?

The AvantGrand emerged from our desire to relook at these elements.
We took the techniques we had cultivated making keyboards and pedals for acoustic pianos and combined them with the latest digital and acoustic technology, driven by the belief that the resulting instrument would be a model for how a piano should be in the modern age.
Innovation born from a thorough knowledge of the true soul of the piano, brought to the fore.
Everything you need, right in front of you.

Ideas and technologies that unify tradition and innovation.

A piano evolved for the modern age.
Not creating a piano, but rediscovering one.
This, summed up in a single phrase, was the concept behind the development of the AvantGrand.
Making a so-called "acoustic" piano requires extensive technique and know-how, qualities accumulated through our many years of experience.
However, a major theme in the creation of the AvantGrand involved consciously refraining from relying on this experience.
Rather than designing from a standpoint of what a piano must be, we gave priority to looking at what it could be, searching for the kind of instrument that would suggest a new direction for the piano.

For Yamaha, with our history of over a century of piano crafting, it was digital technology that provided the impetus for such an outlook, giving us the confidence that we had matured enough as craftsmen to be able to give life to the ideals we had pictured in our minds.
In creating a digital piano that presented the piano as a more informal and enjoyable instrument, we had many expectations for its sound that had to be fulfilled in the initial stages of development.
It is no exaggeration to say that digital technology evolves in the blink of an eye.
We felt that developing an instrument that took two major trends in the piano world to create a fusion, in the truest sense of the word, was a task that we simply had to complete.
Even with our history in making both digital and acoustic pianos, it was a feat that took everything that we at Yamaha knew to accomplish.

The AvantGrand is the crystallization of our hopes for the piano, something which cannot be summarized by simply calling it a hybrid of the digital and acoustic.
It was our superlative knowledge of the piano that supported this bold endeavor; that, and the bond we feel with you, with your enduring love for the piano.

Features

Experience the response and feel of an authentic acoustic action

To express yourself musically, you need to form a physical bond with your instrument. In the case of the AvantGrand series, it starts with the keys. Real wooden keys with a comfortable touch, thanks to Ivorite® keytops that look and feel just like natural ivory. Then comes the all-important key action, which the AvantGrand series has inherited from Yamaha’s esteemed concert grand pianos. Beneath your fingers you sense the same precise weight and responsiveness, the same scope for expression. To capture every nuance of your performance, Yamaha employs a non-contact optical sensor system that doesn’t affect the feel or performance of the action in any way. Under each key is a continuous optical sensor that captures the speed and depth at which that key is depressed. An additional optical sensor affixed to each hammer shank measures the timing and strength of the hammer hitting the virtual “strings”. This information is instantly translated into a beautifully authentic sound reproduction. The more you play, the more you find yourself becoming one with the piano.

Two world-class grand pianos in one

When it comes to judging piano tone, much depends on personal taste. To help you achieve the tonal palette you desire, Yamaha offers the choice of two world-class grand pianos in one—each with its own unique character to convey the emotion you want to express through a piece of music. At the touch of a button on the new AvantGrand N3X, you can opt for authentic sounds sampled either from a Yamaha CFX concert grand or from a Bösendorfer Imperial. As Yamaha’s flagship grand piano, the majestic CFX boasts a wide palette of tonal colors, from sparkling high notes to powerful bass tones. The legendary Bösendorfer, meanwhile, is renowned for its warm and subtle Vienna tone. Either way, the lifelike sounds of the AvantGrand N3X allow you to explore the outer reaches of your expressive imagination.

Evolving the sonic spectrum

The AvantGrand series takes a unique approach to reproducing the sound of an acoustic grand piano. When capturing the original source sounds from a specially selected full concert grand, Yamaha technicians took samples from four different positions across the soundboard: left, right, center, and rear. Compared to conventional left-and-right channel (stereo) recording, this yielded wonderfully rich and authentic results. To make the most of this four-channel source sound, AvantGrand pianos employ Yamaha’s Spatial Acoustic Speaker System—a four-point speaker configuration that allows AvantGrand pianos to deliver faithful three-dimensional recreations of the original instruments. For the N3X, speaker placement mirrors the four recording positions on the source piano.

Digital technology that resonates with you

In addition to the four-channel Spatial Acoustic Speaker System, the AvantGrand features a flat-panel Soundboard Resonator located beneath the music rest and spanning the width of the instrument. This component allows for a more subtle reproduction of the buildup of sound that you feel when playing an acoustic grand piano. It works by using an oscillating transducer to transmit vibrations to the flat-panel soundboard, giving a realistic sound response that is especially evident in the upper key range.

Virtual Resonance Modeling (VRM)

In a grand piano, strings and sounds resonate throughout the entire body of the instrument producing a rich reverberation that envelops the listener in sound. Not only are the strings you are playing vibrating, but other strings ring as a reaction to ones you play. This is one reason the piano sound is so complex and rich.

This phenomena is reproduced perfectly in the AvantGrand N3X through Virtual Resonance Modeling (VRM) which calculates the various states of the strings for each of the 88 notes on the keyboard from one instant to the next. As a result, the N3X reflects the limitless number of factors inherent in playing an acoustic piano such as which keys are pressed, the strength with which the keys are played and pedal timing.

A fully immersive headphone experience

AvantGrand pianos are designed to deliver flawless room-filling sound. But there are times when you may want to keep your playing to yourself. When you’re practicing at night, for example, or when people nearby are engaged in other activities.

In such cases, headphones offer a private sanctuary where you have the freedom to play however and whenever you choose.

Thanks to Yamaha’s advanced binaural sampling technology, the sound you hear through your headphones is remarkably lifelike. This technology uses piano samples recorded by specialized microphones that capture locational information and other nuances discerned by the human ear. The resulting sound is so natural, so enveloping, that you’ll soon forget you’re even wearing headphones at all. (CFX Grand Voice only)

An emotional response

When you play an acoustic piano, the entire instrument resonates. You feel it subconsciously, through your feet on the pedals and through your fingers on the keyboard. It’s this subtle physical sensation that Yamaha’s Tactile Response System (TRS) works to recreate. This digital technology conveys the natural vibrations that emanate from a grand piano, unifying the emotional energy between you and the instrument. Even if you’re wearing headphones, you can use TRS to enhance the realism of the playing experience.

Replicating subtle pedaling style of grand pianos

When you press down on a grand piano pedal, you notice subtly different stages. Light to the touch at first, slightly firmer partway through the travel, and then lighter again as you push through. Skilled players take advantage of these pedal movements by using extremely delicate pedaling to achieve finely nuanced expression in their playing. In developing the AvantGrand, we set out to reproduce as faithfully as possible the sensations of a grand piano’s pedals. The resulting pedals give you the scope to play music how it was meant to be played, while also offering the responsiveness to play more impressionistic pieces that require a lot of half-pedaling.

USB audio recorder

The USB to Device port allows you to connect your USB flash drive and use it as a built-in piano recording studio. You can store your performances directly on the USB flash drive as audio songs. These songs are stored in WAV format, so you can listen back using the keyboard's on-board speaker system, or conveniently play them on a computer, transfer them to a portable media device or upload them to share with friends online.

XLR pro-quality jack outputs

XLR balanced audio outputs give you a professional and stable output to connect to amplified speakers or to mixing consoles.