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Hello all, I have a Yamaha Clavinova CVP609 full console digital piano purchased brand new 5 years ago. It sits in my living room. About 3 years in several keys started to play very loud intermittently. Had to call for service and the piano had to be taken apart (very stressful to watch), and the rubber contact pads which detect velocity and effect volume had to be replaced. About a year later (last week) same thing occurred, new service call, this time rubber contact pads and the 3 circuit boards they hit were replaced. The alleged cause is dust or whatever else can get inside the piano. I always keep the red felt piano key cover supplied by Yamaha on the keys when not playing which comes close but doesn't TOTALLY cover all areas where dust can enter. I don't close the lid because I don't want to keep putting stress on the wire bundle that moves inside when opening and closing the lid. Can anyone suggest the best material, lint free, which doesn't shed any fibers to use as a cover for the keys? I don't want to hassle with a full cover every time I play. Thanks in advance for any ideas...

Topics on this forum are focused on Acoustic Pianos. You'll get more response posting on our Digital Piano forum.

My piano started having these problems ... even though it has a sliding cover.
The dust still managed to get underneath the rubber contact strips.
I don't think that any sort of piano cover will do much to prevent this.

This IS the Digital Piano forum!

I think that post was made before a moderator moved the topic here.

Had digitals since 1986 or so; never had a keyboard cover, or a lid. never had a problem either from contamination. I would suspect some other cause.

May I ask which model piano you have, what was done to correct, and how many times over what period of time has this problem occurred? Thanks.

Wear can also be a cause for the kind of intermittent problems that arise with the contacts / sensors / suction cups / nipples that reside between the underside of piano keys and the electronics /sound board..... do we have enough descriptive names for these small albeit important components? Does anyone know what materials these are made from? I’ve seen some people mention rubber, which may be true, but are these not conductive contacts?

From frequenting this forum a few years now, it seems that this problem is somewhat common with various brands to include Kawai and Yamaha and when it occurs, does not always exhibit the same symptom IE. the familiar “a keypress resulted in no sound”. When it began to happen often with my ES7, often it was “keypress that produced no sound” but at times it was “keypress that produced distorted sound”. Kawai put me in touch with a certified tech who, interestingly, was also a certified Casio tech who’d tired of dealing with Casio Corp. He kept the DP a couple weeks, during which opened up the DP, did not really see much in the way of debris but used compressed air nonetheless because “ it does not always take a lot to cause this problem .... perhaps a bit of misplaced hair or dander is all it takes sometimes”. He also removed the contact strips ( for the octaves wherein I had noticed the intermittent problem) so he could closely inspect visually and remarked that some of the contacts showed a telltale sign of wear - a visible sheen instead of uniform dull grey color. This occured during the second year (approximately 13 months from new) of regularly playing 2 or more hours a day. By comparison, I’ve not (yet) experienced same/similar problem with my Roland DP. I have not seen many Roland owners experiencing this phenom compared to, for instance, Kawai.

I am unfamiliar wirh the Roland line of full console digital pianos. My Yamaha Clavinova has an outstanding sound and resonating feel to it. It has so much functionality built in it would take me a lifetime to get to all of it. But I don't want to go through this every year. Does Roland make something comparable? In poking around online it seems they are priced much lower than what mine was 5 years ago. Ironically, I heard a rumor that the local authorized retailer stores are dumping Yamaha and going wirh Roland. What is the top of the line Roland full console?

LX-17 is currently Roland's top of the line console DP. It superseded HP-508 late 2015. Given its price tag and sound engine, LX17 is definitely a try-before-buy model - it uses modeled sound technology, not sampled. Furthermore, the console shape/footprint is patterned after an upright, not grand.

If you have a few months reading time, there is a thread here in this forum that goes on .... and on ..... expounding upon the pros and cons of the handful of "fully modeled" models Roland rolled out at that time (late 15') to include the LX7 & 17 as well as the HP6xx series.