Greetings and Merry Christmas all! I've been lurking and accumulating information from this wonderful forum for several weeks, and now it's time to decide what my first DP will be. As my username states, I'm returning to piano 40 years after Mom first interrupted my sports activities to broaden my horizons .

I've found a barely used P80 with amplifier for $500, and a similarly used P155 for $700 that includes a stand, bench, and music stand for $700. The P80 is 5-6 years old, and the P155 is less than two years old and the owner has the receipt.

Originally I was leaning towards the P155, but this morning I read that the P80 is the direct predecessor of the P155. Is this correct? Is the P155 significantly better than the P80, or just newer? I'd like to get the most I can for my money, but ultimately the quality of the instrument is more important to me than saving a few bucks.

What would you do? Thanks!

P80 is very old model (10 years or more). The predecessor to P155 is P140. The predecessor to P140 is P120. And P120 was released some time after P80 if I remember correctly and they were different form-factors: P120 has onboard speakers whereas P80 doesn't.

In short: you're comparing different classes of stage pianos (with and without speakers) also of totally different generations.

Yeah the closest thing to a direct descendant of the P80 is the current CP33.

P80 -> P90 -> CP33

I would suggest getting the P155 for sure. Much more modern technology (I believe the P80 had only 4 megabytes of sample memory!)

I used to own the P80. It was a great board. Good action and surprisingly pleasing sounds in a very light package. It was missing one key feature, though: partial pedaling. Even ignoring the other technological advances (which often are not noticeable), this would be a deal killer for me.

The P155 shouldn't be any worse than the P80 in any respect.

Thank you. I'll pursue the P155, which is what I had my heart set on before I got confused.

From the DPBSD testing of the P80:

- Sample lengths are (C1:C8) 1.8,1.6,1.1,1.2,1.2,1,?,? seconds.
- Stretch distances: 3(x6),2,3,3,5,4,2,2,3,4,2,3,4,2(x5),3(x7),1,1 = 32 groups.
- Layer switch @ vel=70,106 (spectral pan & phase displays).

So the average sample time is 9.9 / 8 = 1.25 seconds.

And:

1.25 seconds/sample * 32 samples (stretch groups) * 3 layers * 2 Bytes/sample * 2 channels (stereo) * 44100 samples/second = 21 MB (ballpark).

By today's standards that's a pretty tiny sample set. From a purely sound technology standpoint I'd pick the P155 over that, no contest. The P155 is stretched about the same, has one more layer (reportedly), and has an average sample time of around 2 seconds.

Hmmm. I was way off. Thanks for the info dewster!

So in this calculation, are we assuming that there is no compression of the sample? Just wondering how those work.

I'm not saying that's nailing it though, it's just a ballpark figure. The DPBSD doesn't test every note at every velocity so it could easily be higher or lower.


If they have to compress (not sure why at this point) I really wish they would use a more sophisticated and less audible lossy compression scheme like MP3 or similar. But no - it seems looping, stretching, and limited layers are how they continue to butcher the data sets down. For a toy OK whatever, but in a high end DP I find it quite appalling.