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Perhaps hptech is extrapolating his or her reasoning from German trade union rules. "Sorry, it is not my job to make sure our digital pianos meet specs. I just work here!"

Now I think, the problems, that are spoken about, are rather subtle problems.
A key makes a slight noise, another might be a little bit tight and so on. It is natural material and to some degree such problems are normal. Possibly these problems are not good reproducible and might be subject to clima and temperature.

I never heard about Kawai keyboards with really bad defects. If there are problems, they are always subtle.

If you have a person that must check it and if this person is not a piano player how does he/she know an precise good/bad criteria. He/she will not know it without measuring.
And you will need a quiet and clean working environment for this. This can be expensive in a mass production factory.

I still remember how difficult it was to check the keyboard when I was in the piano store ;-)

And this will take longer than one minute, if each key is as carefully checked as the customer will do it. That will cost a lot of money.

And, lets assume, that takes a Minute: Would you trust a person, that tests 8x60=480 keyboards a day at the assembly line? Such a person must be ill silly and unreliable, otherwise he/she couldnt do the job ;-)


So the only method for improvement is to use more precise material (synthetics) at the critical points.

I disagree. I think a very quick inspection would stop 90% of the cases. I am not a piano player, and I instantly knew that the key was dodgy, within about a minute of sitting down to play.

Interesting also that Kawai has moved to ABS and other space age materials in its wooden pianos -- and has taken a lot of flack for having done so -- yet for its digital pianos where plastics abound it has decided to go the wood route. Weird.

From the point of view of consumers getting help with problems, sometimes the only thing worse than a "subtle" problem is an intermittent problem....

It would be my luck to end up owning one of those 10% cases that manages to sneak through the QC inspection.

I don't want wood anywhere near my DP - manufacturers never met a corner they wouldn't and didn't cut in every possible way imaginable.

KAWAI acoustic pianos do indeed contain action parts manufactured from composite materials (ABS and ABS Carbon), however the keyboard itself is still made from wood.

Not so weird really, when you think about it.

Cheers,
James
x

Whatever you think about a wooden action, I really love it and would prefer it over any plastic key action, at least the ones I tried so far (and that's pretty much all of the brand key actions). I love the long wooden keys that add so much realism to the playing experience. I also had the opportunity to see my keyboard open, and I was really impressed about what I have seen. It's very easy to fix any problems with the key action, everything is easy to reach, and seems very reliable.

Thanks for these informations, I will try again when I'll return to the piano shop, soon, because when I tried the N2 with headphone I wasn't able to get a sound doing the way you explain.

The KAWAI CA93/63 is the king of DP:s!

Here's a Roland promotional video, already a bit older, talking about quality control:

http://www.roland.com/video/page.cfm?vid=19200468&page=4

Even if you take away the promo blabla, it looks as if they go to some lengths to ensure durability. However, no indication is given what tests are done on the regular production units - I guess they don't let them be played millions of times...

Probably Kawai (and Yamaha) have something similar. However, I was surprised when I saw one of the first announcements of the HP3xx series last autumn, it contained some numbers of expected sales. It was just a couple of thousand units per year - not exactly products selling like fresh bread...

Really, it would be great to have someone like Kawai James for the other companies around here to answer some of these questions. There was someone from Yamaha around here who posted a couple of times, but then disappeared again (wasn't it Yamaha Moose?).

Cheers

That just shows you the size of the piano market. How'd you like to be selling acoustic pianos? Not exactly a line at the checkout register. The Roland HP and Yamaha CLP series are designed specifically to be sold be low-volume dealers one unit at a time. Given their price I'd expect sales to be slow.

On the other hand the Roland RD700GX, Yamaha YDP and so on are sold on-line and at the huge mega-music stores where you do in fact sometimes find a line at the register.

The consumer market is very price sensitive and I'd guess most buyers would not even think to walk into any place other than the big stores or look on-line. When I was shopping for a DP I did not even see on Roland HP or one Yamaha Clavinova on display in any of ther places I went, would not even know where to look for one. Of course the numbers are low.

I agree. Of course the numbers are low, even for the low end models the numbers are low compared to other mainstream consumer products.

Who the heck plays the piano these days, anyway?

Could each of us find 5 people in among our friends, family and acquaintances who would be both interested in and able to make the same purchase we are (considering)?

True. Part of the issue here, is probably, a not well founded perception that one can only learn piano at ones childhood. Which is not the case. One can only become a virtuoso, if one starts very early in one's life. If people realised, they can have a spiritual adventure with music also later in their lives - the market would definitely grow by some 30%. However, one obstacle is still there, bad taste for bad compositions, badly reproduced, by bad equipment. So called unvoluntary bad musical 'education' which kills musical sensitivity and imagination. Also, unnecessary sentimentalism of mainstream radio shack 'compositions' accompanied with emotional exhibitionism. You do not really need a good instrument to make a bad music. Do you? Bottleneck. Cheers.

Don't forget that although leisure time has increased dramatically during the past century, it has been filled up with lots of passive activities such as TV watching rather than social and active pursuits at the same time that universal music education in many Western countries has been decimated.

Also, the idea of delayed gratification and having to invest time and discipline into an art or craft has been replaced with instant relief and bright and shiny entertainment. And, the expectation from widespread recordings that only impossibly perfect renditions pieced together and processed in a studio are worthy to listen to.

Music today is almost exclusively something people listen to passively that is produced by a class of "experts", on your ipod or other individual devices, not make yourself actively together with social company.

Combine that with illusory phenomenon such as guitar hero computer games and even the relative to piano popular guitar is under threat as a seroius pursuit. Kids declare victory that they can play the guitar by pressing some colored buttons on their Wii.

Having said that, I am amazed at the number of adult piano students that I come across in Amsterdam. The 35+ crowd is really figuring out that it is possible to learn to play the piano to quite a high standard as an adult if you have 1-2 hours a day and the desire. On my street alone there are two adult beginners and at least a dozen households that all have adults at home playing the piano regularly. The growth for many piano teachers is coming from adult students.

Well said!

At the other extreme, take a look at this video (and his other videos); he plays an RD 700GX. I think these are good example of creative, and wide ranging, musical capabilities. I'm impressed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olQB9QqCqAU

Taking also value for money into the equation, I tend to agree (at least currently).

The KAWAI CA93/63 is the king of DP:s = Good value for money

Even though I really like the Kawai action, I think Roland HP-307 has better bang for the buck.

Mabe for you... For me it's 70-80% Keyboard action and feel, 20-30% Sound (which is also replaceable). The HP-307 is much more expensive. I can buy a brand new more than suitable laptop including a great software piano (e.g. Alicias Keys) for the additional money you have to pay for HP-307 compared to CA63.

Kawai CA-63 street price: euro 2025

HP-307 street price: euro 2499

Not having to use a laptop with loose wires and a software piano to use your expensive, integrated console piano in your own living room: priceless.

And this is ignoring the apples and oranges comparison where the HP-307 offers many, many more voices, a real piano designer functionality, a three track recorder instead of two and, significantly, especially considering your weighting of 70-80% for the keyboard: the top of the line keyboard from Roland including escapement.

To get even close to that keyboard functionality with Kawai, you would need to spend in excess of euro 3000 and still come up short...