Look, I know it's difficult to see divorce as a positive thing, but.......

Haha, you know that was my first thought too. Priorities .

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Dave,

I really loved the RD-700NX when I played it at Sam Ash last year but it was out of my price range. Also as you know I play alot of Blues gigs and the idea of tweaking the Roland sound to make it work for me in a slightly louder mix brought back memories of working that very nice Roland interface till my fingers were numb on my original RD700 to try and make the Roland AP work for me in a louder context. I think the Supernatural piano and Sound Focus may be better than on the old original RD700 but my insticts tell me not to the degree I may want! I had a V-Combo with the AP soundcard same problem.

As I have always said the Roland sound on a louder stage is very prone to frequency cancellation from other instruments and monitors. It was a beautiful thing tough for the half hour or so I spent playing it at Ash. Very nice playing and sounding board. The CP50 was more in my budget anyway and I'm pretty happy with it trading in my CP300.
I still kind of miss 300 at times but the CP50 was a move up in alot of ways though not all. It has a thinner sound than the P Series stuff and I find it a bit less forgiving playing wise.

I too was not knocked out by the Rhodes type sounds on the CP5 but created a layer which isn't too bad. I'll get around to uploading a file to my web site.

I haven't spent any time with the CP5, but I thought the EPs on the CP1 were pretty amazing. The Kronos EPs might have the edge, but by the slimmest of margins.

I have heard Buddy Guy's keyboard player using the CP5 on several occasions and thought it had a great sound for live use.

Exactly why I ditched the FP-7F...horrible sound. If it affected all notes you could deal with it using a velocity curve issue or something but there are actually (to my ears) two little clusters of metallic nonsense in the midrange on the Roland SN stuff - the worst being centred between Gb and Ab in the octave above middle C (that is from memory). The line you have to cross to find them in terms of velocity is terribly fine...at one velocity all is smooth and nice then - TWANG! - just the slightest increase in velocity and it rears its head on those notes. Very frustrating because otherwise they are such fine sounding pianos.

I was able, at least to my satisfaction, to rid my FP-7F of the metallic twang that so bothers some posters by turning off the Reverb (I've taped the button over so I wouldn't even hit it accidentally), setting Duplex Scale at zero, adjusting Stretch Tuning on the offending individual notes up or down, and setting the Key Touch Response to the exact point where my particular playing no longer would elicit any undesirable harshness (vis-a-vis desirable harshness).

Yep!

Seriously, if you're prepared to go back to a 55lb DP why not just take the CP5 out? Although it's about the same weight basically as the Roland, one thing I did notice with the Yamaha was that it was easier to manipulate onto stands etc because a) it has some right angles in the case design and b) the weight is more evenly distributed, whereas the RDs are very back-heavy.

For myself, I've gotten to the point where even the NP seems a little heavy at times, even considered an Electro HP. But I've decided to try eliminating a second board on most outings by grabbing a Stage 2 - which I will do as soon as I decide I can live with the lighter action

Ah, compromise thy name is piano...

I'm with you Aidan. In my Nord gig bag, as nice as the bag is, the NP88 is almost more weight than I want to carry. It doesn't help that my flat is on the second story. I will keep my NP88 for a long time. I only ever use one or two pianos, and one or two EPs live so the 500MB is plenty of space for 2 XL samples and then some. The next thing I'm spending tons of money on is a real acoustic grand piano. No more DPs, except for the replacement NP88 with meaningful updates.

Yeah, I also find the weighted Nords too heavy to gig with, much less these heavier Yamahas and Rolands. To gig with the Nord piano sounds, I'd get the 73-key Nord Stage 2, use its own action for organ, and trigger its pianos from some lightweight 88 (a Casio, Yamaha P95, whatever you like the action of).

That's kind of what I was thinking in my thread about the older Yamaha P-slabs. The P-80 was the cat's arse of its day, and you could probably find one in good shape dirt cheap, if you have the time and desire to find one...and since a rack / module of the NP doesn't exist, a Stage 73 would make a nice combo.

I like some of the Casios, like the pX-310... nice action, and built-in speakers with a line input so you can "feel" the notes of the Nord piano sound when you play it from the 88 board.

Here's a question I'd have, not sure if you or others would know the answer: if you're MIDI'ing the Stage's piano sounds to a slave slab, could you still use and control it with the Nord triple pedal?

Yes if the Nord pedal is plugged into the Nord. Works fine.

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I agree. My trusty Casio PX-300 is a good match for the piano in my 61-key Nord Electro 3
The Casio keyboard is noisy but does´nt bother me much, as I like to play with headphones

Rune

No they aren't much good at all, especially considering they are special "supernatural" ones sampled for the ARX board in the Fantom G and were no good then and haven't changed since (even in the Jupiter 80 which is a totally awesome board in most other areas). Rolands weak point is their EP's which I find amusing as didn't they own Rhodes at one point?

... there you have another reason for keeping the CP5 :-)

Dave, just to clarify... my comment about "yes, you are mad" referred to your interest in the RD, not necessarily wanting to ditch the NP or play out more with the CP5, both of which I can understand from your perspective.

For my own part, it seems that I invariably sacrifice a lot of subtlety in my playing in the heat of a gig, whatever board I'm playing, but that's more probably down to nerves/adrenalin/lack of years of gigging experience.

Yes, the Nord can sound like a toy unless you get everything just right - speakers, settings, maybe some external eq. Yet, the few times I've heard it from across the room I was quite pleased with the effect - quite realistic.
But really, we don't ever seem to be really satisfied with any DP setup - we just something that we can carry around.
A question - is the CP5 that much better than my venerable P250 ?

Yep

I'd want a 700NX for my blues gigs as well as solo piano gigs. The playing experience was really that good I thought! The only thing
stopping me is the $ and posssibly the louder gig issue. I'd love to be able to take a 700NX to a louder gig without having to pay for it.

Like we all would with alot of these DP's.