Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Kawai Price Increase Coming!

And there's a difference between cliche and fact.

It might not be inflation - right now there's a huge semi-conductor shortage that's affecting everything with electronics.

Inflation is caused by an imbalance of supply and demand-- a shortage in supply or an excess in demand or both. If the price increase is sustainable, it is contributing to inflation by definition.

That's good for acoustic pianos!

Got to despair about Scotland's unofficial National Anthem - Flower of Scotland, written in the 60s by the Corries about the victory over the English at the battle of Bannockburn and promises that "we can still rise now". Bannockburn was in 1314, more than 700 years ago. Clearly nothing of any import has happened in Scotland since then to surpass that ?? It's a bit like England having a national anthem that says "We beat the French in Agincourt in 1415" !

A very modest 2,5% price increase at "my" piano shop in Germany.

Rose Morris in London has increased the price of the CA99 from £3200 to £3239, which is an even more modest 1.2%

Prices on entry level acoustic pianos didn't increase. The Yamaha B1 is still at 3.390 € and the Kawai K15 is at 3.475 €. Nonbrands are even cheaper.

Digital pianos based on stage piano technology (like MP11) used to be more affordable than acoustic pianos, they were priced substantially below that. Now the Kawai CA99 with polished finish sells at 4.479 €, which is more expensive than the Yamaha NU1X AvantGrand at 4.419 €, which is polished by default and also features a complete upright piano action at a lower price. And a Yamaha B2 upright piano is only 4.690 € if you prefer the real thing. And if you want both, a Yamaha B1 SC2 is at 5.149 €. All around the same ball park.

So while there is digital piano frenzy going on, there has never been a better time get a real piano. Which is still a real piano 15 years from now, while the fancy touchscreen furniture is outdated and gets thrown out.

Ah, if only... for me, the real price of a "real" piano is the cost of the piano, plus the cost of the real house I'd need to buy to be able to play it. Not going to happen any time soon, but... who knows what the future may hold?

Interesting netflix plot, let's cross breaking bad, w/ piano.

My childhood instrument was 42" upright piano inside a 550 sq ft apartment flat. I never lived in a "real house" my entire life, but I'm playing on acoustic and electronic instruments since I was ten. So I'm pretty biased.

I'll bite just for fun. Computers don't deteriorate; with the same software they do the same thing to the same performance for years, unlike an acoustic piano. I'm going to save nearly £2000 out of the £3200 I spent on my touchscreen on not having to get it tuned (4 times in the first year, 2 times for the subsequent 14 @ £75 a tuning).
On a serious note, as the above wasn't really, having a real Bechstein and a fancy touchscreen furniture piano, I don't think it really matters how they make their noises. It's not like the pianos today are like the pianos in the early 1800s after all.

As a guitarist I'm laughing at tuning costs, when I look at what I have to spend on strings. But that's not the topic. It's the boom which lead to ongoing shortages of digital instruments and price increases for them. Most of these digitals bought now will most likely go the way of their predecessors in a few years and flood the used market, because their ability to double as furniture is pretty limited. Same thing is going to happen for the guitars bought now.

There have been similar times for acoustic pianos earlier in history, which now provide us with a nearly unlimited supply of used instruments. However plastic actions in digitals have pretty limited lifetime compared to the real thing fully made from wood.

This strange idea that only things fully made from wood are real....

Acoustic pianos and digital pianos are both very real of course. When it comes to the used market, it is rather overflowing with free acoustic pianos.

@Dave Milne : electronic wears. You can have to change a spare (I did have to change a mother board on my DP, and on a PC, a broken hard disk gone with all the data...), I had a DX7 with a really noisy headphones output.

The thing is that the improvements of PC are so fast that we are usually tempted to change a PC before it gets out of order.

People sometimes forget, that the tones stored inside their VSTs come from real instruments. And in case of the piano they are mostly made out of wood combined with a heavy case iron frame.

The used market is overflowing with real pianos exactly for the reason I explained my previous post. Which is why I think it's a perfect time to get one instead of being sad about price increases for electronics. And for people wanting to buy a piano new, they are as affordable as it has ever been in the history of the pianoforte.

There is still this scarcity mindset from the situation we were in a few decades ago: Where were only expensive pianos available from domestic manufacturers, shoddy imports from overseas and next-to-useless electronics. That's why since the invention of the grand piano, people looked at substitutes: clavichords, square pianos, upright pianos*), e-pianos, because they couldn't afford the real thing.

Now the substitutes are sold out. That's a unique situation.

*) started with a much inferior action and especially bad dampening mechanisms but improved enough to be considered a proper acoustic piano with a different form factor.

Actually, Pianoteq's sounds are digitally made.

But anyway, for me, the discussion about digital vs acoustical is rather irrelevant. For a very modest price, I got a high quality controller that together with Pianoteq gives me a wonderful piano experience. Even if it would be totally obsolete ten years from now (and I don't think it will be) it is still so worth it.

Well true, but I think you've clearly been rather unlucky. I've lost precisely 1 hard disk in 30 years. It was a 80Mb Connor, which died in the early 90s (didn't lose any data as it was all backed up). I've also lost a mobo, but I think that was because the power supply let go and took it out. My experience is that they either break in the first month or they by and large don't break at all. I think my longest consumer grade hard disk was in service for 12 year 24 hours a day before I retired it ; the outside of the disk travelled about 6.5 million miles or a bit more than 16 times to the moon and back.

Yeah England has a great national anthem of its' own,
oh wait...

The MP11SE went from 2800 to 3400 overnight. So bummed. That’s over 20%!