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A good upright costs more than a high end digital. I would much rather practice on a CA65 than an upright piano of the same price. Of course a 'fake' digital action is not as good as a 'fine' acoustic action, but it doesn't make sense to compare things which are so different in cost.
Also, yes responsiveness is as important as touch, but on a cheap upright piano, poor action = poor responsiveness anyway. I find I can get more colour and character out of a good digital.

Me too.

I've got the same piano - YDP-S51. I've also got a Yamaha C1 baby grand.

The GH action on the S51 is realistic enough for practising on, learning the notes etc. The only problem I find is that the plastic key caps are a bit slippery when doing fast runs. Maybe it's just my technique!

The action is reasonably good at trills, fast repeated notes, etc. Better than you'd expect. The half pedalling is very good too.

As far as touch & tone go, that's where the big differences lie. The touch sensitivity of the S51 doesn't really match the real piano. Not nearly the same dynamic range, and it's hard to play pianissimo. Plus also I tend to play the S51 with the volume turned down quite low, so when I play the real piano it's, like, 'what's this enormous sound??!'

Of course if you only ever play the digital one, then its great. You can play nice, musical performances to your family etc. But if you ever wanted to show off your skills on a real piano make sure you can spend lots of time practising on one first.

You don't have to buy a new acoustic though. I bought a 45 year old Yamaha U3 in good condition for cheaper than a CA65. I'd wager that even at 45 years old, this thing will outlast a new CA65. It's as solid as a rock - and it's a vastly superior playing experience for me. The only thing it doesn't do it rapid repetition.

That's Ravel out of the question for me then :P lol

Not necessarily. I play Ondine on it with no troubles. It's not so much that uprights won't play repeated notes quickly, more that they do it in a different way. Certainly you can't get them repeating as fast as a grand, but you can't necessarily get a DP to repeat as fast as a grand either. The AvantGrand is an example of this - they are not even as good as my U3 for rapid repeats.

Practicing tremolo on a good upright like a U3 can actually build your technique. Because it's harder to do, when I played Ondine on a grand, it was so much easier. The difference is that on an upright, you have to release the key a bit higher (about 3/4 of its travel), and the damper will come down in between each note. On a grand, if you release the key halfway, then press again, the note will sound but the damper doesn't activate. If the rapid notes are to be played with the pedal down, the dampers aren't relevant, then it's just about how far you have to release the key. I don't have any trouble with the rapid chord motif at that runs through Ondine on my upright - it's just more effort, but I believe it is helping my technique rather than hurting it. I'm sure Scarbo would be a different story - but I'm not up to that standard yet anyway. The thing is, the tone for Ravel is so much better with a big upright. I've played Ravel on a DP and it leaves me cold. My U3 doesn't. Being a Yamaha, it has a bright clarity that really works for Ravel.

The right hand motif in Ondine doesn't need to be perfectly clean and even, that's sort of the point of it. Youre right that Scarbo however, or Alborada del Gracioso, or the toccata from Tombeau, are different, and I've practiced all of these on many grands, many uprights and digital pianos so I am aware of the practicalities.

I practise Ondine exclusively on my digital at home, and played it at the weekend on the Yamaha CFX (and CF6), with absolutely no problems. (I didn't try it on the uprights there.)

But I remember attempting to play it on an AvantGrand some weeks ago - and finding it extremely difficult. And Scarlatti's K141 was next to impossible at high speed on the AG. There's something odd about the AG's key action - maybe the friction - which isn't there on the well-prepped acoustic grands.

Some acoustic grands are just hard to play. The action tends to be a lot heavier on some larger grands. I played K141 on a Bosendorfer imperial and found it much harder than on some of the smaller practice grands I frequent. But it was hard in a good way.

I think there is something wrong with the sensor placement on the AGs. Perhaps they don't even use 3-sensors? For all the talk of sensors in DPs, if you don't get them in exactly the right place, the thing will never play naturally and the repeats will always be terrible. Watching Cyprien Katsaris absolutely butchering some tremolo on an AG was enough to convince me that the AG is not for me.

I found tremolos on the CA95 surprisingly straightforward. I didn't play ondine on it but I did play the toccata.

I think it's safe to say that anyone who can play trills in double octaves at the same speed as others play it in single notes with two fingers won't have any trouble playing tremolos and repeated notes on any piano - unless that piano isn't up to the task.

Watch him in the trill at 0:46 http://youtu.be/GOOfXjMEmBE

That's not as hard as it looks, and wouldn't necessarily reveal difficulties with fast repeated notes, which are a different technique and appear in many different contexts.

I agree with Debrucey that this video doesn't show any technique that would test out a piano's action. In any case, my point was that Katsaris is a supreme technical pianist and if he was struggling to do a decent tremolo on an AG, I will blame the piano and not Katsaris.

Debrucey, being the capable pianist you are, I think you are in for a disappointment if you think that practising predominantly on a digital is going to be satisfying and beneficial to you. I know you have said repeatedly that you rank action above tone, but I think you will change that view in time.

Playing composers like Ravel demands management of tone and texture as part of technique. I don't think the two can be separated like you say. I find that playing Ravel on my large upright to be infinitely more satisfying and better for my technique than playing a very good digital. The sheer resonance and liveliness of a real soundboard and strings makes you work for clarity and tone in a way that DPs can't offer you. When you get on a real acoustic after playing a DP for a long time, the resonance is really hard to manage and you realise that there is real technique that goes into managing it. Pedalling, in particular. Clarity is easy on a DP, not so easy on a large acoustic. I would say unless you play music of Bach's era with no pedalling required, it is not wise to confine yourself to a DP too much. As a companion to practice, sure, but not as the main instrument for a high-level classical pianist. A V-Piano may be an exception to this because it is capable of extreme resonance as part of its modelling algorithm, but I haven't spent enough time on one to know about this. Bennevis raves about his though.

I believe debrucey has an acoustic grand to practise on when he's not playing at night. In which case, I suppose working purely on technique on a Kawai DP (even with its unrealistically clear sound and lack of various resonances, compared to an acoustic), while playing a real piano at other times might be OK.

In my case, I don't have the luxury of practising on an acoustic every day - I have to go downtown (London) to get to one. So, I work on both technique and interpretation at home on my DP, then take the finished product to try on the grands in the showrooms. The V-Piano allows me to customize and push up the sustain and resonances to concert grand levels (and beyond), and also allows subtlety of tone and color and pedal effects, which is why it's the only DP that will do for me.

If you regard the V-Piano as an exception, then any ordinary digital piano can also be made into an exception with the addition of Pianoteq or similar software.

Again, as I said before, bad action = bad responsiveness. I might not be able to get a satisfactory level of subtlety out of a DP for composers like Ravel, but I'll be damned if the same can't be said for a £1500 upright piano.

I'm not suggesting by the way that technique and tone can or should be separated. When you regularly play on a variety of pianos of all different levels of quality, in a way you learn to ignore the sound the piano is making and instead focus on what sound the actions you are doing would theoretically produce on a finer instrument. I feel confident that the use of a digital piano, or indeed a crap acoustic piano, wouldn't affect my ability to control an concert grand. This is the sort of thing that always has to be adapted in real time anyway. In fact, I would go one step further and say that it's possible to do all sorts of work on tone, texture, cantabile etc. with a piano that makes no sound at all, if you know what you're doing.

Bennevis and others,
who has experience on long piano playing on acoustic grands.

How do you feel with the PHAIII compared to RM3/GF from Kawai?

I'd like to have some opinion from experienced people, not only from these ones that have been playing on grands in dealers rooms during searching for DP for them only.

In two months I will need to choose between CA65 or HP-505 (or if I will have much more money then CA95/HP507).
Thus the opinion from experienced piano players will be huge advantage for me.
I play mailny Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Bach etc music.

I know it's matter of taste and feel in some way, however I need to leave my poor acoustic due to new flat and buy a DP.

I have played on a lot of grands over the past few years and a lot of DPs over the past few weeks, and my personal preference out of those two is for the CA65, which has the GF action. I regard this action to be the most realistic of all the actions on the market at the moment (if not a little lighter than I would like). I would discourage beginners from making an intuitive decision about these things, however, from the sounds of things, you are plenty experienced to know what you like, so you should probably spend quite a bit of time yourself playing them and decide for yourself which you prefer.

I don't have any experience of software stuff - my computer skills are pretty basic. Personally I doubt that software connected to a DP can give you the kind of responsiveness to your every nuance, from what I've read about interface problems (if that's the right term) some people encounter.

As for using one's imagination to produce the sound quality you expect rather than what you actually hear, without sounding boastful , I'm a past master of this dark art. I've had decades when I was playing on any old cr*ppy piano, which were not just totally out of tune, but had missing notes and sticking keys. And even holes where keys once resided. I just about managed to retain my hard-earned technique acquired from my school and university days by occasionally hiring a practice room, but as for refining my touch and tone and dynamics and pedalling and all that....that all went by the wayside. Two hours on a fully-prepped grand once a month wasn't sufficient.

But if you have regular access to a good acoustic grand, you'll likely not have any problem. There're some concert pianists I know of who practise on a digital (like the AG) to save wear and tear on their acoustic, and once they've got the notes in their brain, practise on the acoustic to hone their interpretation