Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Why do DPs cost more than APs?

I can get a used Yamaha U3 for the same price of a new CA59 DP which will be obsolete in 10 years and will have no spare parts anyway. The U3 is hard to transport from the store to the client while the CA59 can be easily moved by a single courier.
A new AP with a silent mode should have advantages both of DPs and APs.

Why DPs cost more than APs?

Honestly, i don't understand the question

The two pianos you mention cost over here:
Yamaha U3: apprx. 13000 €
Kawai CA 59: apprx. 2600€

What makes you think that the DP costs more?

The Yamaha U3 is used. The Kawai CA59 is new. The AP doesn't degrade much so it's a fair comparison.

Things cost what they do because people are willing to pay those prices for those things. I don't think there's anything more to it than that.

Well, aside from the obvious: a DP never needs tuning, and only expensive hybrids need regulating; whereas AP and AP with silentsystems need tuning and regulating frequently.

Also, the digital component of a silent piano is often inferior to the same component in the digital piano. Digital pianos often have other functions not possible on silent systems. My MP7SE can layer 4 internal and 4 external sounds giving me a possibility of 8 sounds layered together---something useful in a gig.

Further, the R&D involved in DP production adds to the cost.

In otherworld, there are many advantages to digitals and a larger market with more demand.

Most importantly, demand for digitals maybe a component of the cost, particularly at the moment where chip shortage and distribution issues means DP prices are temporarily at a high.

It's a myth. Standard piano life is 50 years. After that everything should be exchanged, especially all felts, hammers, dampers etc. The fact that piano makes a sound and keys are working says nothing. Also new pianos have better desing and sound, especially Japanese ones. Your U3 is probably from 70s-80s and will sound straighforward bright and brittle. For me nothing to rave about. In that price you can have much wider choice than U3.

Yes digitals are better with each generation, but so acoustics. Customers like you think that pianos are degrading and 50 years old are as good as new ones, and they realy on that, as customers are rarely well educated.

Not just digital pianos, but everything related to electronics is ridiculously overpriced. When you think that most of it is just a bunch of plastic, cables and silicon, and labour is done in countries where it is paid at peanuts cost... So where the money goes? Unsolved mysteries of the modern world.

It's no mystery. You are mainly paying for the brain power put into making that bunch of plastic and other materials into something cohesive you can use.

In manufacturing, you're often paying for things you're not aware of. For instance, cancer drugs that work better than existing treatments can cost £90,000 per year per person. What you don't know is that the R&D cost was £20 million, and only 2 in 10 drugs passing through the development pipeline make any profit at all.

So, understanding why things cost what they do often requires an appreciation of the whole effort required to generate these things.

Give it another 25-50 years, and I predict the used AP will cost even less compared to a new DP. Eventually, the AP might be given away, but a new DP will still cost retail.

I think that in the present era there is enough room, technologically, to reasonably argue this point to the extent that this may have been more obvious in the 80’s when DPs first appeared. Back then, how many sound-related parameters were there for a given owner to tinker with in order to get their DP somewhat tuned for the given space in the home where it was used; volume knob/slider, reverb …. after figuring out how to turn it on and turn it up & down, what else did a new DP or owner/tuner have at their disposal?

Today, just among the big three and model lineups therein, at least from the upper mid-range to tops of these brands, one of them includes a techno-tool effectively named virtual tuner, and the other two each have their own array of actual & virtual/software tools/toys - knobs/sliders/tweakers to tune - for those owners who so choose - their DP for the space in which they intend to use it.

Imagine any person - back then or today - with the means to have an AP/GP in their house also being the tuner/technician going under the hood simply because A) this is / was the norm for the era they live in, B) they had the money & space to afford an AP/GP despite C) not having the skill/experience to go under the hood and effect something useful while also not breaking OR hurting parts of the piano or their self. This is effectively / virtually what the expected norm is today for anyone with the means to afford a high end Roland, Kawai and Yamaha DP; they can plunk it down in any room where it sorta/kinda fits - appropriate or not - and if they figure out how to turn it on & up, they can either get on with playing to their hearts content, or get caught up with incessantly tweaking ( the modern , virtual equivalent to “tuning’) until the cows come home or they give up …… might as well throw VIs/VSTs on this potential never-needs-tuned virtual fire. 🙂

No wonder my tuner talks about his profession as a soon to be disappearing. He hinted APs will only keep improving and I then moved to DPs and never looked back...

Well first there are a lot of mechanical parts in a digital piano. And while some things in the integrated circuit world have gotten cheaper, things liked printed circuit boards which are copper haven’t.

And while molded plastic parts are relatively cheap, creating the molds is not.

Not to mention software, circuit board layout, and other non recurring costs.

And I’ve designed and built electro mechanical things in the low thousands and it surprises me how cheap things are being sold.

But it is not surprising to me that we see 5 year or longer cycles on some digital piano models as they simply don’t have the volume to amortize costs over shorter production runs.

I wonder if Kawai, Yamaha have considered building a mechanical auto-tuner/auto-regulator into their acoustic pianos.
With some neural-net and AI technology, maybe it will soon be possible to have an inbuilt tuner... possibly.

The "designed in Germany, manufactured in Bangladesh" bait. Just another trick for selling at 100 what costs 10.


According to my knowledge, the reason why medicines are expensive is because extreme greedenes from big pharma and lack of governmental supervision of their activities.

This is off-topic, but that's partly right of course...

If you vote for candidates which support private healthcare insurance--- and by extension, for political party's which do---then that's going to happen. The results speak for themselves: in the USA in 2020, collective spend was $4.1 trillion (over $12,000/person) per year on healthcare (highest spend in the world), but the USA scored bottom of the list of on basic healthcare outcomes.
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/pu...aug/mirror-mirror-2021-reflecting-poorly

That's almost as much as a Yamaha TransAcoustic finished in white!

There is no single price of a used AP. A used U3 could be a year old from a private home and virtually like new, or a piano that is quite broken down from being hammered on in a conservatory practice room.

My P-515 costs roughly 2000 to 2200 aussie dollars - which is ultra reasonable in price (and is probably way under-priced heheheh). And is as good as the U3 or any other acoustic (any!) in terms of sound quality, piano music making ability and playability.

Why do DPs cost more than APs? Simple. They are not the same thing.

That is like asking why do cars cost more than horses? Simple. They are not the same thing. They will both transport you to the general store but the experience is entirely different, and some horses cost hundreds of times the cost of a new car.

I prefer my AP over my DP so I was willing to pay ten times the cost of a DP for my new M&H BB.

I know that.
But the title is misleading.

Why does a motorbike cost more than a car?
A brandnew Kawasaki Ninja 650 costs more than a 20 years old worn out BMW 530 with 200000 miles...
Why?