Roland digitals: which to choose

[psaiko]

I will make this into a new thread so maybe I can get some response.

I am going to buy a digital and need some advise, and am mostly into roland. I'm willing to pay up to $2000.

The digitals are mainly grouped in two: upright digital (HP-series) and stage digital (RD and FP series). If I understand correctly the only difference between them is looks and possibly better speakers on upright digitals (I will use headphones most of the time), is this correct?

For that reason I have looked most at their stage pianos, the different models are:


FP-2
FP-4
FP-5
FP-7
RD-300SX
RD-700SX

I assume they are now in increasing order pricewise. Can someone briefly tell me the main differences between these models?

In particular what differences RD-300SX and RD-700SX except for 700 being 1.5 times more expensive? FP-5 and RD-300SX is about equally expensive, what makes one of them better then the other? Finally, what makes FP-7 better than FP-5.

Hope someone can answer these questions, I will probably have to choose one of them tomorrow. I haven`t tried any of them myself yet, but will do that tomorrow.

Thanks

[kartman]

I think the most important thing for you to do is to go to a digital piano store and try the different models yourself. It's very hard to describe what digital piano's are like to someone who's used to playing on an acoustic piano and who never touched a digital piano. I was like that until 1 year ago, when I started looking for a digital piano. From your other post I get the impression you're in about the same situation.

To me, there were 3 brands of digital piano with acceptable quality: Roland, Yamaha and Kawai. In general I think Yamaha had slightly better sound than Roland, and Kawai had better touch and piano feel than both Yamaha and Roland.

I think your statement about upright digitals and stage digitals is correct.

For Roland I tried RD-300SX and RD-700SX. RD-700SX has a much heavier (and better) touch than RD-300SX. To me, that was the reason to disqualify RD-300SX automatically, before even listening to the sound.

Yamaha's p-series (p60, p90, p140, etc) had a better price-quality ratio than Roland I think. Even the cheapest model (p60) sounded and felt quite acceptable. Sound of the p-series was generally a bit better than Roland RD-700SX (although that's quite subjective) and touch was just different (to me Yamaha felt heavier, but not necessarily better because it was still hard to play control the dynamics evenly)

In the end I went with a Kawai upright model (CA7) because Kawai's touch was significantly better than all the yamaha and roland models: it allows for very even and well controlled playing, although it's still a bit too light compared to a grand piano. Sound was slightly inferior, but still acceptable to me. Kawai also has a stage digitals series (ES4, ES5, MP4, MP8). I never got the chance to try any of those, since none of the stores had it available in the showroom. I only tried one old model (ES3 I think) which was not bad, but clearly inferior to the more expensive upright models from Kawai.

[psaiko]

I went to the store yesterday. They didnt have the RD-700SX, but the other rolands had way too light action. I got a yamaha CP-33 instead, which I am very satisfied with. Very good sound and action.