Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards What is the lifespan of a DP?

I finally replaced my Technics PX-103 last year. It was 21 years old. I had played it regularly but not heavily, and it mostly still worked fine. But some of the keys were thumping rather loudly, and even though the problem keys could sort of be fixed by opening up the piano and inserting new felts, I decided it was time for something new. I put the PX-103 on Craigslist for $150, and it sold in 4 hours.

I oversaw a few Roland and Yamaha digital class piano labs at various stops in my college teaching career, and it's a little difficult to answer this question definitively. Amplifiers and speakers seemed to hold up well for the usable lifespan of the pianos in the controlled environment of a classroom. Sliders and instrument selection/interface buttons, same thing. The keyboard mechanisms themselves tended to exhibit problems at 12-18 years of use, but those were sometimes repairable - just a matter of how much you wanted to invest in old tech that was not worth anything anymore. Lab controllers and cables lasted until the labs were replaced, though parts of these peripherals did tend to get a bit noisy at times. Mostly, the biggest trouble spots were headphone and other jacks/interfaces, and the headphone/microphone units themselves. It was not unusual to have failures right out of the box when new, and a steady couple of replacements needed each year, regardless of age. It's worth noting that the instance of these problems is not improving in frequency/seriousness, as all the major manufacturers are subcontracting their lab controller interfaces to the same vendor, and the product they offer is barely satisfactory in quality or functionality for the price, in my opinion (sorry for the tangent).

I agree with some of the other points of view I read here - I expect to get a solid 10 years of trouble free service out of my digital pianos, and am unlikely to use them longer than that, because the technology per dollar keeps improving.

Yes, like pretty much every other acoustic instrument. Some that I love are even older relics: lutes and viols were on their way out by the mid 18th century. Pity that much of the music many people like can only be played properly on those... at least at the current state of the electronic art.

Perhaps because we (nature) still keep "making" wood, whereas if you want a UltraAnalog D20400A chip (to name one) you will not find it for love or money 30 years down the line? (They are rare now, at 20 years of age, and out of production)

We can't place a practical bet (unless as well as eternal flash memory you also have an immortality pill), but physics and chemistry being what they are (and having repaired my share of failed capacitors, resistors, transistors and chips for reasons that can only be defined as "aging"), I would bet that your laptop will fail way before 200 years. Maybe not 10, but I did have a Dell desktop locked up in a cool, dry place for 6 years "waking up" horribly corrupted and basically a piece of junk for all intents and purposes (small backup battery failed; rebooted after fixing that to find that hard drive had failed... things may be better with SSD, but even then quantum effects do take place and will corrupt firmware).

Technically flash memory losing its content isn't even a failure. The memory chip still works fine, it's just empty and can be rewritten again. Nobody considers thermal paper losing its content a failure. It's expected.

Of course, a digital piano losing its digital memory makes it a paperweight nevertheless - even if the entire hardware is still perfectly in order. It's as useless as a computer with no operating system installed.

Losing data is not a failure???

A failure is when a part loses data while operating inside its design specs.

When a flash memory circuit loses its data after 10+ years, it's working as specified. That's the price you pay for having erasable memory, so you can update the firmware. Theoretically you can re-flash and it might keep its data for another 10+ years.

Typical fail conditions for flash memory are: You can't store data anymore, it keeps the old contents. You can store data, but not retrieve it immediately afterwards.

Note: The more often you overwrite flash memory, the sooner it will lose its data. A heavily used USB thumbdrive or a memory card might start forgetting data after months already. The minimum retention time specified for PC client SSDs is just one year.

If someone has a 20 year old computer that still works fine, I would be very surprised. It should go to the computer hall of fame. Pong........

I know that lots of folks on here have given examples of older keyboards that still work well. But I wonder whether the same will be said for today's models. My new Kronos is very much 'a computer' with a fast SSD, touchscreen, several USB ports, not to mention some very sophisticated software. The user manual is over 1000 pages. Not to mention joy sticks, ribbon sensors, vector sticks, etc. Sounds can be engineered from my computer and sent back to the Kronos. Older keyboards are in relation much simpler. New keyboards are also more like computers because the companies update their software. The Kronos is has already had three system updates.

So if new boards are more like computers than ever, will we expect them to have the same relative lifespan?

I've still got the first desktop PC I ever bought in 1992. It's a generic 386 intel type board, with 64MB ram. Still works - originally had win3.1 on it but I later updated it to Win98SE. It's slow, but has never once failed to boot up. I kept it for old time's sake - don't know what I'll ever use it for.

But to address your question, no, I don't think new keyboards will have anything like the longevity the old ones had.

You should desolder and remove the NiCd battery from the mainboard, before it leaks and kills your nice vintage PC. It will lose its CMOS NVRAM BIOS settings though (write them down, so you can reenter them after each power-up). Of course it also won't remember date and time anymore, but that's not a big deal, those PCs can't make it past the year 2000 anyway.

I'm amazed you've held onto a quarter-century-old computer.

I just tossed a ten-year-old laptop. And I'm considering replacement of this five-year-old desktop.

I don't ever intend to stay on the leading edge. But computers don't hold up for long. Even when an old computer works properly, it can't keep up with the demands of modern software.

I sold an Amiga 1200 (the last commodore computer I ever owned from my youth gaming days that started on the Commodore 64) for $300 on the eBay. Original Apple iPods with the mechanical click wheel are fetching over what they cost new when they came out.

An Apple Macintosh Color Classic has a buy-it-now of $450 today with 10 people watching!

What's old is hip, what's new is played out!

It's amazing what some people will pay for nostalgia.

I wouldn't pay two cents for that old Mac. Indeed, I'd pay to have it hauled away.

(My trash pickup won't take appliances ... just ordinary trash. And the nearby "regular" recycle place takes only the same in bigger quantity ... plus yard debris. So I'd pay someone to haul away that old Mac rather than drive 15 miles to the nearest recycling center that would accept it.)

So ... anybody wanna buy a ten-year-old Dell PC laptop?

Last year at work we took 20+ ten year old computers to the tip. They pretty much all worked except for the odd failed HDD or PSU. They don't go in landfill here though, there's a recycling center where volunteers format them and sell them again for $30-$40 to students and pensioners etc.

I guess it's like anything, hold onto it long enough and it's value will go up again. There'll probably be 10 years in the middle where it's worth nothing though!

You are correct in that more sophistication can lead to easier damage, especially with time.

I used to gig with what you would refer to today as vintage instruments. Some of them were/are next to indestructible (Hammond organs, MIDIboard) but others were pretty fragile (Mellotron, ESQ Mirage because of its floppy disk drive, etc.).

In the end, it depends on build quality, how often you play, if you are careful with your gear (this includes protecting sensitive instruments with an UPS) and... on luck.

Playing Lemmings on an Amiga isn't "Nostalgia" - it is ORIGINAL FUN (-:

Hardly_Does_it_Run - - vibration, (poor)reliability, sloppy handling, oil leaks and all, THAT is nostalgia.

99 of every hundred made are still on the road - - ONE made it back home.