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Two questions:

1. Price. What is a reasonable price for a used Kawai CN23 digital piano in excellent shape? Should I expect some type of warranty if I buy it from a Kawai dealer?

2. Sounding board. A solid spruce sounding board versus a laminated sounding board. Does this difference separate the "men" from the "boys" when it comes to a acoustic grand piano. I know there are many other variables but this question just concerns the sounding board construction and touch and tone. Solid spruce or laminated?

Any insights on the above two questions will be appreciated.

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Surprisingly Larry Fine does not really take an up or down position on a solid spruce versus a laminated sounding board. What's your opinion?

Thanks.

There are good laminated boards that are better than lower quality solid spruce boards. However a high-quality solid spruce is better than any laminated board on the market.

2. Soundboards are available in various levels of quality, even among "solid spruce" boards. The final arbiter of which board you prefer nowadays is the tonal performance of the piano- if it sounds great in all registers and has good sustain, I don't really care how we got there (so long as it lasts). Other posters far more knowledgeable than I (try searching the old posts) have alluded to great strides in the performance of recent laminate soundboards while the supply of natural wood materials suitable for the job dwindles; at the same time, others have raised the marketing side of this issue, as in generations past only low-quality pianos were outfitted with laminated boards...and the new generation products have to overcome that historical stigma.

So far as I know, consumers do not have any examples in the new piano market in which to try two similar pianos with the different materials for the sake of comparison...though it would be fun to reenact the "Pepsi challenge" in this case!

BOREGARD, see this thread here, especially what Del wrote.

For the price on a digital you're probably better off in the digital forum.

Re soundboards: All of the best pianos in the world use solid soundboards, not laminated (I'm not aware of any exception to this - although the Phoenix uses alternative materials). However some of the worst pianos can also use solid soundboards. So you can't use this as a single factor to determine the quality of the piano. You have to consider and evaluate the whole instrument.

The only advantage of laminated sound boards is that they can handle environment changes better than solid sound boards. So if you live in a place with little control over humidity or temperature, you know which one you should pick.

That beind said, laminated sound boards are introduced also for cost cutting, since manufacturers can use low grade spruce as the core wood without being noticed. So in the end, you get what you pay for.

That is one advantage. But priorities are shifting and a growing advantage of laminated soundboards -- in addition to more consistent performance -- is that they have the potential of stretching Earth's dwindling supply of musical instrument grade spruce.

It is true that low-quality laminated soundboard panels are cheaper than comparable low-quality solid spruce soundboard panels but good laminated soundboard panels, i.e., those that are actually designed for high performance, are not appreciably less costly than comparable solid spruce soundboard panels. This will change as the cost of musical instrument grade spruce continues to increase.

ddf