(MONEY Magazine) – Imagine a traditional acoustic piano that can, at the push of a button, play Rhapsody in Blue with the same flair and feeling of Gershwin himself. It can also record the exact way your child's piano teacher plays Beethoven's Fur Elise, so your child can hear it again later. Or if your kid needs to practice endless scales, the piano can fall completely silent, while your budding Evgeny Kissin can listen to himself play through headphones.

That instrument is no fantasy, thanks to a new wave of high-quality acoustic pianos that incorporate whizbang digital features. A far cry from the soulless all-digital models of years past, these hybrids are true pianos and home entertainment systems that can be enjoyed by the virtuoso and sausage-fingered alike.

The runaway bestseller is the feature-packed Disklavier ($32,000 for the model pictured above; 800-711-0745, ext. 460) from Japanese piano maker Yamaha. The Disklavier, which comes in both upright and grand models (cost: $8,500 to $50,000), sounds just like a traditional acoustic instrument. But at the flick of a switch, it becomes a high-tech player piano. You just insert one of more than 400 albums on floppy disk, from Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker to the sound track of Jesus Christ Superstar, into a box that sits unobtrusively under the keyboard, looking a bit like a CD player. The albums, manufactured by Yamaha, cost from $25 to $38 each. "It was amazing to see the piano playing by itself," says Gail Albinski, 49, a homemaker in Sayville, N.Y. who impulsively bought a $22,000 mahogany baby grand Disklavier after seeing it in action at a Long Island store last May.

Like personal computers, Disklaviers are constantly getting new state-of-the-art features. For instance, you will soon be able to plug your Disklavier into a new-model TV, tune to a digitally recorded concert and hear your piano play the same music--live from your living room--with the exact touch and emotion of the performer on stage. TV transmittal of such digitalized musical data, while rare today, will likely become standard in the next few years.

Acoustic/digital hybrids have been available in the U.S. since 1989 and are a big hit in Japan. But they have begun to catch on here only recently, as features became more sophisticated and the number of music software titles grew. Sales of the Disklavier have doubled in the U.S. during the past four years to an estimated $75 million last year. The hybrid's sales are all the more remarkable given the depressed state of the industry, says Larry Fine, author of The Piano Book: Buying and Owning a New or Used Piano (Brookside Press, $16.95; 800-545-2022). In 1995 just 98,000 new pianos were sold in this country, compared with 282,000 in 1978.

If you already own an acoustic piano but want some of the features of a digital, consider retrofitting yours. Sacramento-based Burgett Inc.'s PianoDisc (cost including installation: about $4,500; 800-566-3472) converts your regular piano into a digital player piano (nearly 300 titles are available); you'll pay an extra $1,400 or so for a system that has a recording function. Another solid system that's usually slightly cheaper but offers only about 200 titles is the Pianomation from Buffalo-based player-piano maker QRS Music ($3,500 to $5,000; 800-247-6557).

--Paul Lim