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What were the couple of things that "stood out" to you?

And Yamaha as well. I guess it's less conventional on the Piano side of the forums. Digital sales is still quite a small part of our business but of personal interest to me which is why I participate here. Since I make it obvious that I'm a dealer, I hope there is no confusion over disclosure. I'll put some thought into adding it.
On the previous PX-130 & 120, I was satisfied with the normal touch sensitivity, but I immediately had to change to the heavy setting on the PX-150. Also, the sharps were more textured than I expected. The location of the headphone jacks is great for an audio out but inconvenient for...headphones. I've certainly seen that on other slabs. And unfortunately, my display model arrived with a little ding on top.

The touted improvements were pretty easy for me to notice. The Concert grand sound is now much more detailed. The action felt firm. The satin finish is pretty and I love the new knob. I only had maybe 5 minutes with it so far.

How about the flats?

I keep wondering why Casio and others won't include a digital sound output to the amplifier... Be it optical, coaxial or HDMI.
In an old thread we speculated that maybe this was to prevent you from doing perfect digital recordings of the samples, but now that they have included perfect digital recording straight to USB... The lack of a digital sound connection to the amplifier is even more painful.

Casios are always designed to be cost effective, so it is unlikely that they will add anything that requires so much as an extra jack unless they think it is a feature many people would want or might help convince them to buy. (And I'm not saying that adding digital out IS as simple as an extra jack.)

Personally, I wouldn't find a digital out very useful. What's your application for it? (I guess I'm thinking, if I was so concerned with recording pristine audio quality into my DAW that I wanted to bypass Casio's DACs, I'd just run a software piano in the first place and get a better piano sound besides!)

If they asked me for what I'd like to see added, it would be things that are more performance oriented. For example, many Roland and Yamaha pianos have had knobs or sliders that make it easy to adjust the balance of split/layered sounds as you play, I miss that. Or (especially on the more controller oriented PX3) it would be nice to see a mod wheel and a jack for an expression pedal. I think stuff like that would be more useful to more people than a digital out.

I'll take all of the above, please.

Plugging the piano to my sound system without any interference or signal degradation.

Nowadays, even a $175 iPod Touch has digital audio out (with an adapter).

The sound system is analog, though. So no matter what, you're converting digital to analog, and the DAC in your sound system isn't necessarily better than the DAC in the keyboard. Is it just a matter of avoiding cable issues? If that's the case, the best feature (for long, interference-free runs) might be to have a balanced output. Though you can pretty much add that with a direct box.

Oh. Thanks for the info.

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Hey, Mike, look for "Vika goes wild" on YouTube and try to get her on board. She's a piano goddess. She has an expensive Roland supernatural stage piano, and I'm wondering what she could get from the new Privias.

Hard to tell if it's SuperNATURAL (sorry for the ALL CAPS, blame Roland) since it's an RD-700GX. Which is only SN if the SN expansion board is installed. It sounds pretty good, but as we all know, the main problem isn't at the listener side, but at at the performer side. I still feel like trading my NX for a GX right now

New promotional video to the new range of Privia digital pianos by Casio Australia

Thanks!

PX-750 (@4:10): "Unlike most digital pianos, which use compressed waveforms to generate sound, our new lossless audio compression means you'll enjoy the purest sound we've ever offered in a Casio digital piano"

I'm trying to figure out what the heck this means. DPs might use something like delta compression to reduce storage size, but that's lossless. I'd be pleasantly shocked if these new Casios aren't stretched loopers - to me those are some of the most egregious lossey compression schemes you can use.

They come right out and say the PX-850 has string resonance (key sympathetic resonance) and it seems all of the other models have pedal sympathetic resonance.

Isnt the PX-150 supposed to be out today? I can't order it online...only pre-order!

J&R has 10 of them in stock as of now. It's the only place I've seen 'em.

FWIW, I agree with what Dewster said about the lossless compression. Their statement seems very strange to me - it was my understanding that sampled pianos typically use lossless compression. (I believe Kawai uses some kind of spectral modelling - that certainly could be considered as a form of lossy compression, though) I'm wondering whether something got lost (or "added") in the translation between what the engineers stated, and what the marketeers ended up saying.

Greg.

I'm not sure I would assume that DP's use lossless compression for storage of their samples by default. Lossy compression makes great economic sense to a DP manufacturer simply due to superior compression ratio. Lossless compression algorithms are typically around 2:1 where as MP3 or something similar is more like 11:1. If you're the design decision guy in charge of penny pinching, it's a no-brainer.

Stretching, looping, and limited velocity layering are lossy compression - if really pushed they can put a piano in 50 MB or less, which is something like 100:1. Too bad they generally sound like crap (IMO). But they're easy to implement.


But if you're a DP coder faced with ancient slow processors and ancient tiny RAM then modern lossy compression schemes like MP3 probably aren't an option. There might be latency issues as well. But I would much rather have an MP3 compressed sample set than a looped & stretched sample set.

If Casio are referring to stretching, looping, and velocity layers, I think it is a very strange way to say it indeed.

Greg.

In a sense, I suppose that's accurate, in that they are all methods of "throwing out data" and using the smaller amount that is left to recreate something close to the original. But that's not the typical usage of the phrase, so I wonder if that might not create more confusion. The more common usage, as in MP3 and JPEG, is that data is removed by an algorithm that attempts to automatically determines the "least noticeable" bits of data, so that something perceptibly close to the original (we hope) is generated from the smaller file when subsequently decompressed.

@anotherscott: exactly.

Here's some more info:
http://www.casio-intl.com/asia-mea/en/emi/privia/info/#air

Casio do appear to be using the term "compression" in the standard way.

Greg.