I recently bought a new digital piano: a Kawai Novus NV5. Since I've found other people's thoughts online very useful, I figured I'd write about it in the hope that it may help others.
First, a bit of background.
I started taking piano lessons at age six and played actively up through high school, with the most time on a Yamaha C1 baby grand. In college, I stopped taking lessons, bought a Yamaha P-140, and would play once in a while; but not to the point of studying any new pieces. After college, I played almost none at all and the piano sat in its case for long periods of time. That had been the situation for more than fifteen years.
Some months ago, I was watching an anime about piano called Forest of Piano. Its intro contains Chopin's Etude in C Major, Op. 10, No. 1, which is a piece I've performed before. It was just repeatedly reminding me that, hey, I can do that! (Well, sort of. My execution was never as clean.) Why was I just watching some fictional character enjoying piano instead of playing myself? It really started getting to me.
So, I set up my old Yamaha P-140 again and picked a piece that was reasonably challenging and sounded cool to me; more on the piece later. While practicing, I found that some of the keys would once in a while fail to reset, the speakers would sometimes crackle, the cheap stand I had was a bit shaky, and the pedal would move around if I wasn't careful. I promised myself that if learned the piece pretty well and thought I'd enjoy playing more that I'd look into getting a new piano. Still digital, due to needing to practice quietly often.
Months later, here we are.
I originally thought that I'd get either a Kawai CA-79 or CA-99 due to people's praises about their great action, mimicking that of a grand piano's. Of course, one should always actually try out a piano before committing, so I went to Prosser's Piano & Organ to check them out. I decided I liked Kawai's sound signature more than Yamaha's and the action was pretty nice, though still notably fake. However, I found that the speakers of the models on the floor were disappointingly buzzy for certain notes and that the key texture was distracting. While I'd probably get used to the texture, I was pretty sure the sound would just keep on bothering me. I didn't know if it issue was just the specific pianos at the store, but I didn't want to risk buying a new one and discovering that it had the same issue. The vibrations from the sound board of the CA-99 were fun, though.
Since I was at the store anyway, I figured I'd try some of the other pianos out. One of them was the Novus NV5. I had read that the NV5 had the same speaker and sound board set up as the CA-99 and that the main difference was just that the NV5 has real upright action, so I wasn't expecting it to overcome my dislike of the buzzing. But I ended up being really surprised!
It sounded very convincingly to me like a real piano. I'm sure there are many people who would be able to immediately tell the difference, and I think it benefited from being upright shaped due to uprights sounding somewhat boxy in general, but the distinction from a real piano was pretty subtle to me. It certainly did not have the buzzy quality that the CA-79 and CA-99 in the store had. I don't know if the comparison would be generally true across other NV5's and CA-x9s.
And of course, the action felt like a real piano, notably the bounce back on repeated notes for the piece I had worked on. Playing the NV5 was just so much fun and brought a smile to my face. I ended up playing various things and performing various tests for a few hours across two different days before discussing with my wife and buying it. Because the NV5S was coming out, I was able to buy the one on the floor and avoid any risk of a different one having buzzing speaker issues.
Some of my notes and comparisons:
- My Yamaha P-140 is of course somewhere between 15 and 20 years old and was much cheaper than the NV5, but besides some of of the more obvious advantages, some unexpected differences for me were:
- The timbre difference between soft and loud was more pronounced for me in the NV5. I really enjoyed playing softly on the NV5, whereas on the P-140 it felt a lot more like just turning the volume down.
- The NV5 has sympathetic resonance and the P-140 does not and it was a pretty noticeable difference.
- The action of the NV5, at what I thought was the same volume, seemed a little heavier than the P-140, CA-79, CA-99
- I had read that the action made the piano play more loudly with headphones on, and while that is true, it was a pretty small difference and I can't imagine it bothering my family any more so than my P-140. So far, that has held true.
- There was also a Novus NV10 at the store. While having a real grand piano action was great, the sound was definitely clearly artificial to me and didn't elicit the same marvelous illusion of playing on a real piano for me. It was better than the CA-79 and CA-99 at the store, though. I also did not like how it looked as much, so the net effect was just that I did not enjoy it as much as the NV5, which was a pleasant surprise for my wallet.
- A common consideration that comes up in regards to the NV5 is that due to it having a real upright piano action, it includes a notable disadvantage of an upright: the key needs to reset at least some before being played again, or else it will not sound. This limits how fast a note can repeat and may limit other techniques that depend on the key not being fully reset (less fast repeated pianissimo maybe? I can't say that I've ever intentionally depended on this other than for very fast repetition). On this point:
- I would indeed sometimes hit dead notes on the pieces I played, but this was due to poor technique on my part and not because the piece ran into the limitations of an upright action.
- Compared to a K300 Aures in the store, very fast repeated notes would actually "blur" unnaturally on the NV5 in a way that I don't think a real piano would ever do while still sounding mostly distinct on the K300. But this was at a speed beyond any piece I've ever had to play. It would probably make playing something like the Scarlatti Sonata in D minor K. 141 harder, though, if it's even possible.
- The key does not have to completely reset on either the NV5 nor K300 to sound, but it actually did have to reset further on the NV5 than the K300 to sound. So, the K300 is actually somewhat better than the NV5 in this regard.
- I decided that, while this limitation was unfortunate, I'd be okay avoiding pieces that can't be played on an upright. At some point you just need a real grand piano to play certain
pieces; I've seen avant garde stuff where the pianist reaches into the
piano to pluck the strings. On the positive side, I tend to like playing on random pianos and this would allow me to practice avoiding technique that cause dead notes on real uprights.
- I did not spend a lot of time on the K300 Aures, but the action felt the same to me, other than what I've noted above.
- The NV5 does not support note-off velocity, but I've never played that subtly in my life and don't anticipate doing so in the future.
- After the piano was delivered, there was sometimes rattling near the touch screen that was not present at the store, which was very disappointing. Eventually, I figured out that pressing in on the cabinet above the touch pad stopped it.
