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Yes, I'd definitely wait for NAMM. It's been more or less confirmed that the P-85 will not get a successor at NAMM, but I don't know about the SP-250.

The keys of the SP-250 are nice, but perhaps not as suited for playing very fast pieces. The P-85 IMHO works better for fast playing, but there's the possible issue with slippage on the black keys.

Yes. I paid $940 for my Yamaha P155. It's a step up from the P85 and still within your $1000 cutoff.

I don't know if the 20% deal is still goin at Music123 but you should be able to find a P155 for under $1k if you wait for another sale or simple ask the folks at Guitar Center for 15% off.

It was also recently pointed out in this forum that the Kawai EP3 has just come down in price to close to $1K.

...

A saleman at Guitar Center told me his manager would always aprove some kind of discount, maybe up to 15% but certainly 10% The trick is to go in an look like you are serious about the P155. Play it for 20 minutes or so and then when they ask tell them you'd like it but the price is high.

Salesmen are trained not to offer a discount unless they think the sale will only be made if one is offered. So they look for a serious customer who is on the fence about buying. They will ask "what can I do...?" Then tell him you can't spend over $1K. I was told the manager will look up what they paid for the instrument and they need to make at least $40 on the sale to cover costs but he also looks at inventory and how many they sell every week. Of course if it is a price match then they are forced by policy to sell the unit even if below cost managers have no desecration on price matches. CG pays about $940 for the P155 so they have room to sell for $1K. Disclaimer: The above was true in California in December.

Chris A,

This kind of hearsay is bad information.

There is ample markup on digital pianos to cover price matching, coupon offers, and discounting. Otherwise, the king of pretend discounts, Best Buy, wouldn't even be dabbling in the product category, and the Internet purveyors wouldn't be offering across the board discounts to anyone on their mailing list.

My suspicion is that your salesman friend at GC is informed on the basis of 'need-to-know' and nothing further, and that the cost figures he is quoting to you are internal ones used for operational purposes inside GC, and are in no way the actual wholesale unit price that GC pays when it buys these instruments in huge quantities. If GC truly operated at a baseline $40 margin on $1k musical instruments, or at general margins of 10 - 15% over wholesale cost, they would be out of business.

My own experience is that mid-level regional US MI vendors can and will easily undercut the uniform price front of the national mass merchandisers like Sam Ash, GC, and ZZ Sounds even though they do not buy in the same quantities. I've owned many digital boards. I've never bought one from any of the national chains and I've never paid anything close to their supposed discount prices.

I don't know, but I always assume the markup is ~100% every time it passes through a middleman. If money doesn't come in as easy as falling off a log, it seems no one can stay in business. It would seriously surprise me if GC or MF paid more than $650 for the P155, as it would if Yamaha spent more than $325 building and shipping it.

As an aside, I (like many here I would imagine) got the latest Musician's Friend catalog a few days ago. In it, the Planetwaves PW-CT-07 strobe tuner is on sale for $39.99. I went to music123 and filled out their "Beat This Price" form ("Get the guaranteed lowest price in 5 easy steps!") and they came back with $71.99. I said no, and they said they needed the catalog and page number, which I provided. They then came back with $59.99 and said they couldn't price match it and that they were sorry. When did the word "guarantee" change to mean "if we feel like it"? I would think that "guarantee" would have some kind of self-imposed penalty associated with failure, but in this case I guess not.