We Bought Our “Forever” Piano – A Bösendorfer 230VC with Enspire Disklavier Pro and a Custom Interior Macassar Ebony Wood Inlay
I could hardly sleep Friday night because of excitement. It felt like Christmas as a kid, when all that joy, happiness, and anticipation are bundled together. Only much, much greater. Imagine you had been waiting on Christmas to arrive for more than thirty years.
The history: Back in 2010, I wrote about the Bösendorfer Strauss grand piano, using it as a time value of money lesson. I had wanted a Bösendorfer for so long by that point, but I had continued to deny myself it for the sake of compounding my portfolio. Later, in 2011, I posted pictures of us touring a Bösendorfer show room in New York City. After that, in 2013, I told you that I had sworn to myself I’d buy either a Bösendorfer Strauss or Steinway & Sons Model B concert grand by my mid-thirties. (That plan slightly changed because when my mid-thirties arrived, we had relocated to Southern California and we were scaling up our operations and planning on becoming fathers so, instead, we bought that glorious Yamaha YUS5 TransAcoustic 2 upright piano for the three bedroom place we were leasing in the middle of Newport Beach, due to space restraints.)
In other words, those of you who have been around for a couple of decades know that an honest-to-goodness concert piano was definitely happening at some point. I have dreamed about it since childhood. It’s the only thing as old as my obsession with stocks. Aaron and I were music majors specializing in opera performance and piano as a secondary during our undergraduate studies. In the earliest days of the blog, there were even videos of me playing the piano. Some of you wrote me over the years, or spoke with me in person, telling me you thought it was absurd for us not to get one sooner since it clearly brought us so much joy. Yet, the portfolio continued to win. To echo a sentiment you’ve heard from me many times before, I wanted the instrument but, in a world of mutually exclusive decisions, I preferred piling up more cash-producing machines for my collection. Years rolled by and I wanted more Coca-Cola stock. I enjoyed amassing Berkshire Hathaway shares. I wanted a bigger stake in Hershey. This is a familiar story by now.
I did come close to buying one back in 2006 or 2008. Very, very close. It was one of the hardest “no’s” I’ve ever uttered and took every reserve of willpower I had. I think the price we were quoted came to around $88,000 – if I recall correctly, it was a model 200, maybe? Perhaps a 214? I can’t quite remember as the lineup has been overhauled a bit since then. In today’s dollars that would have been around $131,000. Oh gosh, it was agony. I thought about it for a long time.
The world kept spinning, we got older, and things have changed. Aaron and I are about to celebrate our respective 42nd birthdays, and we recently celebrated our 23rd anniversary. We are going through a list of the items and experiences we have always wanted, and now, faced with the fruits of decades of work and compounding, re-evaluating our trade-off costs. All those years of prioritizing our portfolio and business operations paid off. It’s time to actually enjoy ourselves a bit; an ever-so-slight loosening of the reins. You know recently I ordered that Theodore Alexander Grand Staircase desk I’d wanted for more than a dozen years as part of this process. There are a few other, smaller items I’ve also been tracking down to check off the inventory, too. Looming large at the top of the list, though, was the concert grand; the “forever” piano we wanted to keep for the rest of our lives.
We began the research process a week or so ago since things had changed in the piano market in the interim between present and the last time we seriously looked.
Bösendorfer had introduced an extraordinary new line of pianos back in 2016 called the Vienna Concert, or VC, that we needed to familiarize ourselves with playing as it had a more powerful sound favored by the American market. We were shocked by how phenomenal they were. I mean this: These instruments are exceptional. There is a reason Bösendorfer is compared to Rolls Royce and this particular lineup is the peak of their artistry. Manufacturing them involves absurd amounts of patience (the wood alone has to cure for more than five years), planning (nearly every one is custom), superior materials (it’s designed for musical perfection without regard to cost), and hand work (they take twice as many man hours to complete as a Steinway). Specifically, we sat down to a Bösendorfer 230VC, which is a bit larger than 7’6″ and the biggest size down from the full-blown orchestral grand used in huge auditoriums (for the musicians among you who want a comparison, it’s larger than the Steinway & Sons Model B, which comes in at 6’11”, and the European-only Steinway Model C, which comes in at a bit over 7’5″).
It was unlike anything we had ever played. It absolutely blew the Steinway away with a richness in the bass that was in an entirely different class.
We couldn’t stop thinking about it. We realized if we bought the Steinway & Sons Model B – which I was somewhat convinced was going to emerge as the winner – we would be filled with regret since it was clearly outclassed by the vastly superior Bösendorfer 230VC. Multiple days of going between showrooms and playing them back-to-back … there was simply no comparison. During our most recent trip to the showroom, we had a video call with the dealer’s national sales manager and priced the Bösendorfer with the Enspire Disklavier Pro system add-on (along with the pre-installation of thousands of recordings for live playback, including the several-thousand set of Bösendorfer exclusive classical recordings) and a custom in-laid Macassar ebony wood around the interior of the soundboard since we felt it was much more beautiful. (Here was another area where I couldn’t believe we were deviating but it simply seemed correct. We had planned on a Strauss art case model, but this updated configuration just struck us as being perfect for the space we were designing, ultimately winning us over as the combination of the richness of the classic concert look with the custom Macassar around the rim should be breathtaking.)
The dealer got us a quote that evening as Aaron was making dinner for the kids. Now that we actually bought it, I hesitate to include the price but it seems only appropriate after I have used this as a financial example of opportunity cost in my writing for decades. I was also grateful in my own search when people were transparent about what they paid. So, in that spirit: All-in, when everything was said and done, the MSRP on what we wanted came to about $286,998 with sales tax of $21,525 plus $400 for delivery for a total of $308,923. With Bösendorfer, though, no one is going to pay the full listed price. The dealer worked it down to $202,500 plus $15,217.50 sales tax plus $400 delivery for a grand total of $218,117.50, or about 29.4% less. (Actually, to be completely accurate, the final total came out to $218,493.75 after tax because we added a $350 full-piano protective cover which also had $26.25 of sales tax on it.)
It took basically no time and Aaron and I agreed. The deal was struck. There was a wave of elation and satisfaction that washed over me. Nothing in my life has had the deferred satisfaction on this level. Nothing ever will again. This is the major dream purchase of my lifetime. There is no other consumer good, regardless of cost or rarity, that can provide me with this much joy and utility. This was it. This was the crown jewel.
So, yeah … it happened. The piano finally won against the compounding calculation. I’m half convinced some of my friends and family never thought it would but I’ve been perfectly consistent from the beginning. I knew this day would come. After all, isn’t this the entire point of intelligent investing? Money is just a tool to design the life you want. It is important, and should be respected, but it is not a god nor an idol that should be worshipped. I have never wavered on this.
It’s going to take 6 to 12 months for the factory near Vienna, Austria to produce the instrument for us as there are only a few hundred manufactured each year. These are, quite literally, the finest pianos on the planet. They just take time. However, so we don’t have to wait to enjoy the Bösendorfer, the dealer is going to provide us with the non-Disklavier acoustic-only version of the same piano from the showroom, installing it in our home for us to use in the meantime at no cost. Considering there are only sixty or so of these (the 230VC) in the world the last time I checked based on serial number, it is an embarrassment of riches.
This doesn’t even feel real. I used to have these brochures of Steinway, Yamaha, Bösendorfer, and other grand pianos that I would carry with me in sixth or seventh grade, staring at them swearing to myself one day I’d own one. I’d look at the beautifully printed pages, running my hand along the paper imaging what it would be like to play it rather than the Wurlitzer spinet we had (for which I was still grateful). I didn’t even see a grand piano in person until we moved to a larger, nearby city I was in high school in early 1998. There simply weren’t any around in the part of Missouri where I grew up. I didn’t see a Steinway & Sons in person until my junior year in 1999-2000 when I began taking lessons at a private conservatory in Kansas City. The Bösendorfer was even later than that as I was already an adult given their much greater rarity and cost. Then, long after we could afford one, I kept delaying the acquisition since I felt there was a trade-off cost given my youth and I wanted to prioritize financial independence. This purchase means something in a way almost nothing else in my life has.
Why am I posting this? A few reasons. Many of you have been around since as early as 2001, following my life. You’ve seen me make these decisions and focus on compounding. It only seems fair to write about the conclusion of the matter after watching me defer consumption so many times. Others of you are quite young and just starting out in your own journey. I want you to understand, on a visceral level, that there is a payoff for wise decisions. Live below your means, do intelligent things, and focus on avoiding wipe-out risk and time does the heavy lifting for you. Whatever your Bösendorfer is – be it a certain rare car, a trip around the world, a nice watch collection, endowing scholarships to a university, donating a park in your hometown – you can achieve it. Strangely enough, by the time you actually get there, it’s usually such an easy lift you don’t even have to think about it, which makes it even more surreal. I also think there is an object lesson here in self-denial. By creating artificial scarcity in my life, I still appreciate the value of a dollar. I still go out of my way to use a coupon or take a discount and am keenly aware that I have been extraordinarily blessed; that I should never take it for granted and much of my success is a result of being born in the United States as a millennial when the opportunity in certain areas were abundant to a family that both loved me and wanted the best for me. When you enjoy a lot of prosperity early in life, especially after coming from not just a family but a community that did not have that kind of abundance, I think you need to be careful not to indulge every whim. The ability to consistently tell yourself “no” is powerful. Develop it. Use it to your advantage to make sure you are pursuing the things you truly want.
Finally, I should probably say this to preempt a good number of comments I imagine would otherwise be coming: Steinway & Sons pianos are great instruments. I may still buy one if I come across a model that is particularly beautiful and I want it in some side room or, maybe, an office. In fact, you know what? I will. I know I will. It will probably be an Onyx design, or maybe an all Macassar ebony art case model we have custom made for us, though time will tell. When I do, I am sure I will love it the same way I feel about the many fountain pens I have. Each has its own purpose; it’s own “color” and emotion that it evokes. I view Steinway pianos, particularly the Model B, as the automobile equivalent of, say, a Mercedes S class. It is almost never a wrong answer to go with a Steinway. I still maintain that one of the reasons Elton John’s 1970s era was so good was the ingenious method producer Gus Dudgeon developed to mic a Steinway grand piano in order to produce the iconic “sound” of that era in songs like Amoreena on the Tumbleweed Connection album. There is such a wonderful dryness to it. They are also so easy to play and very forgiving technically.
The reason most people have heard of them is they built an early advantage in the classical industry premium space. Whenever a young, emerging musician begins to make a splash on the national stage, Steinway is rumored to make a nearly impossible-to-resist offer to them, telling them if they sign up to be a Steinway “exclusive” artist, they will not only have access to nearly any instrument they want, but when they tour or travel to different locations, they can select an instrument from the local inventory and have it delivered to the venue. The cost savings to the musician are enormous as they would otherwise need to rely on the quality of the house instrument or pay substantial sums to ship around their personal instrument and have it serviced. As a condition, though, they are not allowed to say anything negative about Steinway, which can be interpreted as praising other brands. In a country as geographically large as the United States, this first-mover advantage essentially created an unassailable economic proposition to those who make their living performing. In other words, it’s driven in no small part by cost savings. In addition, a lot of Steinways are bought by non-musicians as a status symbol to put in their living room, which is a bit of a tragedy for those of us who play and love pianos (though I suppose the economic support for an excellent piano manufacturer is overall good for the industry, and thus praiseworthy). Bösendorfer, in contrast, is, as I mentioned earlier, more akin to Rolls Royce; an instrument built purely for musicians with the only objective being perfection of the instrument. The average non-musician, at least in the United States, has probably never even heard of it. The appeal is not for status, but for the love of the object itself.
There are other super-tier companies, as well, though Bösendorfer is my favorite. To provide a comparison, to its Rolls Royce, there are some Bentleys out there. Faziloi in Italy is one, which is the favored brand of a long-term friend of ours from back in music school. C. Bechstein in Germany produces some wonderful instruments. You can actually hear and see an excellent example in Norah Jones’ 20th anniversary livestream of her Come Away with Me album. It has such a mellow softness to it that is distinct. (It’s a great concert – you should watch it.) There is Steingraeber & Söhne. There is also Blüthner, which were historically difficult to find new in the United States but have been more available in upscale piano galleries in recent years; at least that is my impression.
Again, we’re now talking about instruments made by musicians for musicians. When you get into this tier of construction, personal taste is really the final arbiter.
Yamaha has some special lines that carry the same Yamaha name as ordinary pianos but are truly at the level of the brands I’ve mentioned; e.g., the Yamaha CF line is handmade. These are especially beloved by pop musicians for their brighter sound. Since I mentioned him earlier in the Steinway section, Elton John in recent decades had a Yamaha CF6 model in his home in Atlanta that he used for composing after he decided to stop using Steinways more than thirty-five years ago, he records on another top-tier 7’6″ Yamaha model, and, of course, in concert, he plays the Yamaha 9′ top-of-the-line concert series with the Disklavier system installed. (I’m not kidding when I say the Yamaha YUS5 TransAcoustic 2 upright that we have sounds and plays substantially better than a lot of grands on the market, which is the reason we kept it rather than using it as a partial trade-in credit on the Bösendorfer 230VC. The YUS5 TA2 models retail for $28,199 plus tax and shipping as of 2024 but I’d absolutely buy it over a similarly-priced consumer mid-range manufacturer such as Young Chang; e.g., the Young Chang 6’1″ grand piano model Y186 is going to be outshone in every way in terms of sound and touch by the Yamaha despite being an upright. I mean, it’s not even close. Heck, the YUS5 even without the silent features of the TransAcoustic technology upgrade is vastly superior to Yamaha’s own G series grand pianos. I have to assume the only reason someone would buy the inferior grand is for the desire to have something that looks impressive rather than focusing on the actual build quality and sound of the instrument. Maybe they don’t play themselves so they don’t know any better?) Of course any piano is better than no piano so the general rule is buy the best quality, which you enjoy the most, and that you can afford.
Ah! I am so excited!
