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But, but, but... top-notch classical pianists play big time concertos and virtuoso repertoire on these new Casios!!! If you can’t play well, then the problem is in you!

Yeah, or it could be he didn't want to lose his YT cred by doing something gauche like saying something nice about a Casio. I don't see how noise can affect your judgement of key weight.
Well they're not really doing so on $10k+ "legit hybrids" either.

Being already in the second page of this thread, I have to disagree with everything you already said or you will say in the next posts.

Well I would refine that to "high end DPs are better than sub-optimal uprights". Musically, I'd take a quality acoustic upright over any DP or hybrid or whatever. DPs are just practical simulations to me. They're quiet and don't weigh as much as a truck, and if they're reasonably close to a real piano in sound and feel, it's good enough. At any rate DP snobbery is always good for a chuckle.

Yes, agreed, I’ll take an acoustic upright piano over a digital, even when the tuning on the acoustic piano has gone pear-shaped, as the Brits say, as it has done again on my rental U1. Oh, well, it will be replaced by a Yamaha DYUS1 soon enough.

I like acoustic instruments and I don’t mind things that change, even for the worse, lol. The acoustic upright is kind of like the plants it shares space with, they’re both changing, and, no, the plants are not on top of the piano. I have a friend who has 50 years at the keyboard, and a degree in music composition, and he can’t understand why I want an acoustic piano. Part of it is because I never got to play on all of the acoustic pianos that he’s played on.

Anyway, I say give Casio a break. Compromises have to be made on a $699 keyboard. I’d have loved to have had that Casio as a kid, I’d have loved to have had any kind of keyboard instrument.

So, any critique should be dismissed as "Casio bashing" because Casios are cheap?

What about Medeli? They are even cheaper.

Should all Medeli critique be dismissed as Medeli bashing because Medelis are cheap and YouTubers don't want to lose their credibility by saying anything nice about Medeli?

Or is it perhaps possible that there's no anti-Casio conspiracy and people actually say what they honestly think?

I'm of course only half serious with this comment but there's this strange phenomenon here that any critique on Casio ends up with dismissal of the critique just because it's critique on Casio as if Casio were somehow sacred or this were an official Casio safe space. 😁

I have a Kawai now (formerly Casio) so maybe I should start systematically dismissing any Kawai critique as Kawai bashing until people tell me to stop or a moderator blocks me. 😄

...or we could all just focus on the actual topics without metadiscussion. But how boring would that be(?)

(Still not offended...)

I never meant that all criticism of Casio should be dismissed because Casio is building cheap keyboards but that the criticism has to be weighed with the price in mind.

People have a tendency to bash everything. It’s not fair to dispense $2k worth of criticism, based on more expensive keyboards with better actions, on a $699 keyboard.

In the past I used a semi-weighted MIDI keyboard with different weight between white and black keys... This difference in weight is incredibly annoying, because it makes your playing much more "jumpy" when you move from a white key to a black key. A trick to fix the issue is to use a different velocity curve for the black keys. I remember I made a script in Reaper to lower the velocity value of the black keys, otherwise it would have been unbearable to play... Maybe those Casio models do the same thing inside their firmware?

It sounds like it could be a serviceable workaround, since James said that he didn't notice the issue when he first played the keyboard at NAMM due to not being able to hear the sounds well in the din.

My understanding is this is also how Yamaha "faked" grading on the NWS action of the CP1 and CP5.

Who bashes Kawais? I've played them. They're good digitals, although I'm really not a fan of Kawai acoustic pianos. But I don't have to reflexively point that out every time I see the brand name.

Noboby as fas as I can remember.

They are sometimes critiqued for some specific features.

And people are okay with that.

They don't pretend like it's an anti-Kawai conspiracy and say that YouTubers can't say anything nice about Kawais to not lose credibility.

Which is nice.

If only we could also talk about Casio in a similar neutral way... 😉

(Okay, enough about that topic. I've said it now.)



If you don't hear what you play you can't notice the uneven response from white and black keys. I suppose.

Oh, and for the record the black keys on my Kawai ES-100 might be a little lighter than the white ones. At around middle C the blacks start sinking down (not all the way) with a 54 g weight and the whites with a 58 g weight. (Or so. It wasn't a very accurate measurement.)

Well, if you are taking a "faith" stance, then you probably don't have much of a leg bashing the Casio faithful?

James directed the conversation to a concerning issue that is measurable (and deserves to be verified), but you are content to swing the conversation back to random Casio bashing... Just a thought.

Well yeah, that's what I was wondering about. If it's a Casio PX-S3000-specific flaw, then so be it. But it would be more useful to do the same test on a wide range of keyboards, digital and acoustic. I've never said or thought that Casios are perfection.
I wouldn't call it a "conspiracy" as much as "groupthink". The groupthink generally seems to be that if a Kawai has problems, it's a case of "good piano gone bad", whereas with a Casio it's "bad piano, period, beginning with the brand name on the thing". That's the difference.

Of course "conspiracy" was intentional exaggeration. And I haven't paid attention to the "groupthink" as much as to the opposite i.e. complaining that "Everybody always hates Casio just for it being Casio".

It's of course possible that both happen here.

And of course the reason for "the guy in the video" not having done a similar test on other pianos (yet anyway) is that he says he hasn't experienced the problem with any other piano, acoustic or digital.

So there was no need. Before he tested that specific piano. Which happens to have a "Casio" logo on it.

So, it wasn't singled out just because it's a Casio.

(Or that's how I see it anyway.)

Which doesn't mean that the groupthink isn't out there.
The guy apparently has access to loads of pianos and keyboards. If I observed/felt that anomaly, the first thing I would do is a comparison, especially if I was going to make a video documenting this flaw in one model only. Otherwise it's just a way to make YT fanbois and those who listen to them feel relieved that they didn't fall for such junk.

Indeed. I have a Roland, which I really like. Many people here detest Roland pianos. I don't take it personally.

I like Rolands myself. And Kawais and Yamahas. Don't know anything about Korg, Kurzweil or Nord. I'd love to get hold of a Roland C-30 digital harpsichord though. They sound great and look beautiful, like an old clavichord.

I like Rolands too, and am also partial to the odd Yamaha, every so often...



Cheers,
James
x

However, I think the guy in that video should have done the same weight test on at least 2 other DPs in the same price range, otherwise you may think he was a little biased.

What's in the bag James? I'm guessing four litres of Diamond White, 60 Superking Black, Pot Noodles, scratch cards and a copy of the Daily Star.