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Typically for the performer, the player perspective on some DP models is adequate in volume if not timbre. But for co-performer and audience in acoustic settings (specifically NOT modern production with sounds reinforcement, microphones, PA systems) most digitals fall far short in volume, dynamic range, timbre/tone, and frequency range. So for example, a digital piano is not really a great choice for acoustic recordings and performances in the classical sense (a stereo Mic in a nice acoustic setting like a church or hall) with or without a singer, choir, or trumpet, violin, etc. Even a well equipped model like N3 or V-Piano Grand requires additional sound reinforcement in concert settings.



Yes, your needs and expectations of course are the biggest concern when selecting an instrument. There are some settings where the digital is preferable, maybe even better. But must definitely some where not. Economics unfortunately becomes the deciding factor for most, of course.

Maybe we just should acknowledge that DP is not acoustic piano, same way a speaker is not a live concert hall, yet we still listen to CD's at home because it is impractical to stuff 40 piece orchestra in your kitchen.
Real Piano has an acoustic loudspeaker as well - called soundboard. It is a vibrating wooden membrane of the size of largest piano side. Sure it can fill a hall, sure its frequency/distance characteristics are vastly different than the tiny 5" speaker. They should be.

We can actually simulate piano timbre sound with speakers perfectly, but only at one sweet spot. Everywhere else it will either sound too muddy or too thin.

The situation is not really to spend additional $20 for better "something" because there isn't one thing. You can't just increase size and pressure of Piano build speakers, nor the chamber volume as you want because that would be an equivalent to listening to a floor speakers from 1 ft. Your head will hurt. By increasing size of the speakers, you also need to be further from them because they also need to play louder to vibrate all that mass.

The more expensive pianos would put more speakers etc, and you can say it sounds better than the cheaper ones for sure, but an acoustic piano player will still happily tell you, "it doesn't sound like real thing".
So I'd say don't sweat it, if it doesn't sound as good as you like, get some powered monitors, put them on stands, back further from you and if you have space behind the piano. Crank it up and you have the best piano sound ever without spending $3000 bucks on just a tiny improvement in cabinet sound.
I have few KRK monitors around my house and found them to be the ideal mix of power and clarity for the money.

A lot of it isn't to do with speakers, but the sound spectrum. hear the gloomy sounds of Moonlight Sonata on a concert grand, and know for certain you can't replicate that on a less than premium digital. They just don't do it; Pianoteq does. Other software stuff will too no doubt. The CS11 and LX5 are getting there.

And when you do get that elusive sound, your DP speakers are muffled since there's little separation of bass and treble and usually, no soundboard and certainly no strings.

The answer for me is to persist in playing on this setting. you then forget about the faults and enjoy the benefits for what they are. Maybe some additional speakers would help, but the clutter would be unacceptable.

The alternative is too financially and audibly painful to contemplate. The "Audio" part would be the wife's contribution . . . .!!

Sorry for all of my posts on PW being about this. But finally, the thread where it belongs!

I've played on the Casio GP-300, Roland LX-7 and LX-17, Kawai CA-67 and CA-97, and some slightly lower-end Yamahas (no AvantGrands). IMO, the sonic clarity for all of them can be massively improved with good near-field speakers/amplfiers for only a couple hundred dollars. For more volume, decent PA style loudspeakers can be had for a bit more. Using the on-board sound reproduction of the DPs, high bass distortion was most obvious typically but the whole frequency range was compromised. I guess that's why the professional-market DPs are slabs with no on-board speakers at all: why try to research and develop sound transduction quality in a piano cabinet that traditional loudspeaker technology has already achieved?

Okay, it's just an opinion and it emphasizes sonic clarity over emulating all the (maybe unnecessary) pieces of the acoustic piano playing experience. But I wonder if anyone would like to comment on their experience that says otherwise. Specifically, taking the OP a little further in this direction, if you've tried an entry-level (or better) pair of near-field studio monitors from the past ten or so years (~$300 new) hooked up to a high-end digital piano with relatively "championed" on-board sound transduction quality (~$3000, give or take) and compared the on-board vs. the stereo loudspeakers, what did you find? If you found a DP (maybe the LX-17) that you've heard beat out something like the JBL LSR 305s in sonic clarity, please speak up! Would be interested in the details of what you heard, let alone if such an experience exists.

There is indeed a great difference between sound coming out of common external speakers and sound from internal speakers located inside piano cabinet. But that's not because internal speakers are so much inferior in quality, that's because of additional resonance that a big piano cabinet creates.

If manufacturers would want to produce a clear radio-like piano sound they could easily equip DP cabinet with external speakers and the sound would be pretty the same as if you would connect a pair of studio monitors to the line out of your DP. But manufacturers don't do it because they want a sound to be more resonant (even by sacrificing clarity), more like coming out of a real acoustic piano, because many people prefer this type of sound, especially if they had been playing on an acoustic piano for many years.

The bottomline is that you should decide what sound you like better. If you prefer sound like coming from a traditional piano you should consider buying a DP in a wooden cabinet. If you prefer more clear piano sound like that coming from radio, than you should probably consider buying a cheaper slab-like piano and a pair of monitors, or 2.1 setup, or good headphones.

I rather agree with the last post. To me the fault lies in a basic design misconception, rather than in the quality level of single parts. This is perfectly clear if you look at how an acoustic piano, and loudspeakers, generate sound in a totally different and incompatible manner.

A piano's strings and harp deeply need a cabinet, meaning soundboard and the wooden rim, in order to *generate* the core of a proper piano sound. Without all the cabinetry, the harp alone would sound following it's name: muted as a harp.

But for loudspeakers ( wich is supposed to reproduce, not to create the same piano sound ).. well, in the hifi world there is no such thing as a reasonably sounding loudspeaker operating stuffed into a half closed cabinet, while even firing against the floor. A loudspeaker has to operate unobstructed, firing against the listener, and suspended into a cabinet that should create less possible resonance. You can experiment this by yourself stuffing your hifi system into your clothes cabinet and checking out how it sounds.

So then, why does the industry keep doing this self apparent error? Well because of course: "what are those ugly speakers piled upon my pianoblack furniture piano in my parloir room?! If i had known about them, i'd rather bought an ugly plastic pianoslab and some serious monitors for half the price!".

This is what we ask for ( me too ) , since we long for a beautiful almost-acoustic for our homes,which we by tje way play through headphones 90% of the time, so they keep mixing acoustic apples with digital oranges, and trying to microcorrect the obvious compromise by addressing minor parts quality, and adding technical nonsenses as a soundboard and even surround sound ( you ever heard a piano sound from behind your back? ).

It is a compromise, and it even works acceptably, but you can improve it. The best possible design would probably be the one Yamaha does it on their advantgarde grands: with unobstructed speakers firing up from the "harp", resembling holes in the harp itself. But there are no holes in an upright to mimick, so you have to disguise the stuff.

There already have been pianos that do a better job with their speakers.
Here's a CLP-990 from the late 1990s.
The speakers are in the "upright" portion of the cabinet, above the keyboard and facing the player.

.....forward over two decades and there's the CLP-685. Is this instrument twenty years ahead of the CLP-990?

To give you some perspective, the CLP-990 featured 88-key sampling and 5 dynamic levels per key. By the time I bought the CLP-380, Yamaha had abandoned 88-key sampling for stretching, and the number of velocities remained at 5 (they no longer divulge this information).

Add to that the speakers and action (long pivot-based wooden keys) on the CLP-990, and one can deduce that Yamaha has made monumental progress since the 90's.

Clavinovas at some point used to have some sort of "speaker ports" on both sides of the front panel just like some modern Kawais do. Roland HP-506/8 also have some sort of a forward projecting sound system (i.e. holes in the front panel/fallboard whatever you want to call it). Also some Kurzweil models look like thay have a fabric covered front panel/fallboard as if it allows sound to come trough. But do any of those have any effect on the "boxiness" of the sound? (I don't know.)

Never played one, but that looks like a better idea than enclosing them below the keyboard and firing downwards.

By the way, all that resonating cabinet above the keyboard and between the speakers is a good idea for an acoustic, but less for loudspeakers, unless you can precisely control that it doesn't get boomy. A speaker has to sound clean, but from within a wardrobe that's not easy at all.

Did you have that reversed?Shouldn't you replace "progress" with "regress"?

I was trying to be sarcastic.

Keep up the good work, Yamaha (once again, my attempt at sarcasm).

Interesting topic. We have a Roland GP-607 mini grand and I think it sounds great in our living room. It's a 4.1 sound system with the main pair of speakers pointing straight up under the lid and the subwoofer pointing straight down at the floor. The sound is quite subdued with the lid closed as you may expect, but actually quite pleasant for practicing with the pair of near field speakers still firing at the player. With the lid up it provides a much richer and resonant room filling sound. Interestingly this sound system sounds terrible when using it as a music streamer with very little stereo separation and muddy base. A pair of floor mounted stereo speakers is night and day better for general music listening. But as a piano it's pretty convincing. I don't know how it compares with the upright LX17 with its extra speakers, but I suspect the more open grand cabinet is better suited to speaker systems.

I have the LX17 and have wondered how the GP607 compares. Even though it's a small lid on the LX17, opening that makes quite a difference in the sound. They designed that very well, and it is a noticeable difference from the HP605 and LX7 models when sitting behind them. I wonder how much of the sound difference is those two in the lid as opposed to the overall speaker system.

Not having the GP607 to try, I would guess those two end up being fairly similar, and the GP607 just plain needs less speakers, due to being able to be more open with the lid.

The main reason we went with the GP607 was to fill a space in our living room, so it was more of an aesthetic decision. I never got to listen to the LX17 in the end but I am curious about the comparison. When you look at the speaker designs for both the LX17 and GP607, they make sense for their respective cabinets, which are quite different. I wonder if the GP607 cabinet simply made it easier to achieve a decent sound or whether Roland traded off cabinet cost against the sound system to hit a competitive price point. Although I can't see how adding more speakers in the GP607 would help and the bass is more than adequate with the single sub. So I'm inclined to think it was probably the former.

Regardless I'm very happy with the end result and I expect the LX17 sounds great too from what I've read here and elsewhere in reviews. Could they be even better? I expect so with high end audiophile amps/speakers, but that would more than double their cost based on the cost of true high end amps/speakers.

I have a Yamaha p155 for about 8 years. Recently , in the past year I noticed its speakers distort, mostly in 5th or 6th b flat Key, and sometimes random other keys and is intermittent
Few concerns
1. Though I prefer sound coming from piano , I am beginning to wonder if all digitalis even high end clavinova with big speakers type get like this ???

2. O yea fyi, I never play more than 8 tenths volume, and speakers distorts as explained past half way the volume
3. I called Yamaha. They said they never heard such a problem for my model but I can take it to a Yamaha authorized technician and whether it is clavinova or p series neither would do this in terms of durability

I'm just disheartened bc I like internal speakers

Well .... 8 years is probably time to trade it in on a newer model.

Nothing lasts forever.

Well that depends, speakers should.


Have u had pianos with internal speakers if so how did they hold up over 5-6+ years?

I find the sound of ES8 very decent, considering it has only two relatively small speakers. I have some issues with it though, not necessarily related to the speakers, depending oh the piano sound I choose. My favorite is the EX model but some keys sound a little harsh and louder than other. One of the reasons I think it happens is due to resonances in the room. It may explain the reason why your DPs sounded great in one place and so so in other (or vice-versa).