Dear Lou,  The range from which you can select is perhaps wider than
you may have imagined.  Your wife's interests (and yours) will bear
heavily on your choice.  I shall present one view of the situation,
but there are other ways of looking at it all.

I suggest you make your wife part of your research team, even though
it'll spoil the surprise.  She can help you distinguish between a piano
and a PSO.  (That's a "Piano-Shaped Object", and I can assure you that
you do not want one!)

If your wife is an excellent pianist, she may enjoy having a modern
piano that will appear to record and play back her piano playing.
Or she may hate it and continually find fault with the mechanism.
Or perhaps the piano itself will not be good enough for her ability,
or simply not her style.

If your wife is an amateur pianist like me (I'm not very good), she
will enjoy having someone else take over the keys (perhaps one of the
several arrangers who contribute to MMD), and if she likes singing,
she'll love to invite friends over for a sing-along with an old player
(properly restored) that uses paper rolls.  Tens of thousands of rolls
are available, from the very antique to the very modern.  Several MMD
subscribers can be of help here.

If your wife is a tinkerer or craftsman, she may enjoy learning how to
rebuild a piano and a player mechanism (two separate jobs), and thrill
at being able to change an old piece of junk into a working antique.
Several other MMD subscribers would stand ready to cheer her on.

If she's an economist as well, she'll wonder how to value all those
hours spent fixing it.  A thousand hours to have a finished result
worth $2000 is no more than $2 per hour, but it may be a lot of fun.
If she's a furniture restorer, she'll know enough to leave refinishing
the piano case to a professional who can handle all that acreage
without wilting.

If your wife is a masochist, she may take a perverse joy in trying to
rebuild someone else's failed attempt, where parts are missing, ruined,
or glued badly, like with impossible-to-remove epoxy.  Some rebuilding
jobs are far more feasible than others.

Peter Neilson
Sanford NC