Yamaha Arius YDP-143 Digital Piano Review

Just plug it into the wall and if you can press the power button, you're good to go. Of course, it's compatible with any kind of amp you'd like to attach it to, or recording equipment.

We're not talking digital sound outputs on the Yamaha Arius YDP-143, but it's got all that the market expects of a piano in its class, sadly perhaps a little less in the realm of connectivity. USB-to-master connectivity is included. We can't seem to find the discrete L/R outputs, though we suppose you could always use a splitter to take a feed from one of the earphone outs.

It's - what we expect of a digital piano today. Unpretentious, small enough, although not small enough to move without a decent-sized vehicle. It works in the living room, elegant enough with its black cabinetry.

The Yamaha Arius YDP-143 comes with Yamaha's excellent three-year warranty. This would be an area we suppose we'd like to see the whole industry push the envelope in a little more. Many non-digital pianos have a warranty of ten years; and digital pianos require so much less maintenance - why can't they go ten years as well? We doubt these pianos are breaking within ten years, but the warranty makes us wonder.

Turn it on and start playing. You can actually press a button to modify the hammer action, which we'd imagine comes in handy for those with arthritis.

The piano plays pre-recorded orchestra recordings you can play along with, as a kind of novelty. In the realm of more piano-imitative features, this Casio's engineers actually took into account the ways that certain keys resonate when other keys are held down. So this is a rather intriguing feature which takes the piano imitation to a rather interesting level. Casio appears to be trying really hard here in the way of imitating the soundboard on an actual piano. Someone in the R&D department at Casio deserves a raise. Is this a case like the old Avis slogan, "We try harder?" You'll have to hear it for yourself!

The top lifts like a regular piano for direct-to-room resonance. It looks as decent as we'd expect today's digital piano to look. The other question that remains to be answered here is - we know the Casio Privia PX-860 has a boatload of innovative features. Is Casio fulfilling all the basics in terms of what your traditional Yamaha Arius can do in the way of design? We admit they feel similar, but you'll have to try it out for yourself and see whether you think Casio is encroaching on Yamaha's long-standing reputation as the quality control leader.  

Casio's imitation ivory and ebony finishes on the keys promises that even if it's a little damp, your fingers will experience a minimum of that slippage that can sometimes throw your performance quality when playing.

Oh! Just when we were thinking Casio was making serious inroads to contest Yamaha's long-uncontested title as a distinctive leader in electronic digital pianos, we discovered Casio's warranty. And by the way, when searching for it we had to dig through the warranties for all of Casio's other markets, like timepieces, calculators, etcetera! And when we finally found the musical instrument warranty, it turned out to just last one year. That suggests to us that Casio isn't merely discounting its product because it's trying to win over Yamaha and Roland players; it suggests to us that perhaps Casio is skimping somewhere on the materials they're using. You've been warned. Although, if you're buying a piano that you only need to last a year and won't mind the hassle of making good on the warranty - say, if you plan on using the piano in a context where you plan on throwing it off the back of a truck intentionally after a year - this is a great choice.

Those who are either new to pianos or who are exploring going digital for the first time might find the dazzling array of buttons and controllers a little confusing at first. That said, if you're looking to get a great piano sound out of your machine and are considering seriously performing on electronic equipment, you really need to know your instrument. The great part is, you don't need to hire a piano tuner!

The less-great part is that sometimes, in order to best emulate that real-piano sound, you might need to hire some acoustic engineers! Don't get us wrong, the capability to be a grand piano is all in this little machine, which is more portable than the Yamaha Arius YDP-143, by the way. The challenge, perhaps, is carefully calibrating your machine to unleash all that quality from the highly-capable digital piano.

As with most Rolands, because all the investment is really in the quality of the pre-amplified magic, you'll almost definitely need to connect this to your exterior amplification system in order to get the best sound out of it. That said, it can do things, in the purest sense of the sound, that the others would be hard-pressed to imitate.

Notwithstanding that you need external amplification as with most Roland pianos to make this baby shine, Roland is nothing if not highly connectable! Any outputs wanting in the Yamaha you'll find in this, including standard stereo sound outputs.

We feel this is almost an unfair comparison because it and the Yamaha are designed for two different things. This is not furniture; it's a very big, and highly worthy, investment in a digital instrument whose beauty, to be fully appreciated, must be measured compared to other strictly digital instruments. There's not a lot of wasted space or exterior aimed at making this look like something other than it is - a digital piano. This economy of design in the Roland RD-800, complemented by the ruggedness we've come to expect of the Roland company - which also does lots of other stuff besides Pianos, by the way - is commendable.

Roland actually offers generous warranties on most of its digital piano products. Part of the reason this is a difficult one to evaluate is because the RD-800 is simply limited in availability at this time. Therefore, most talk of Warranties is moot, because if you can't buy it right now, how do you evaluate the Warranty? We give Roland 4 out of 5 Stars based on their other lines of products and generous warranties which, even on digital, they stand by sometimes up to 5 years, beating out Yamaha in that regard on the products we've compared them to here.

Ease of use is never really an issue in this day of digital pianos. Just plug it in, turn it on, and you're good to go. Nothing exceptional here, either.

Sound and connectivity is more or less on par with something in between the Casio and Yamaha models we've investigated here. We're not blown away by anything, but it's a decent digital piano from a decently-reputed manufacturer of the real thing.

This Digital piano is designed to stow and go rather than to be elegant furniture. In that regard, it's more comparable to the Roland, though not nearly as sophisticated, particularly in the sound realm. You'll need a stand or something to put it upon, since digital pianos don't generally fare well in marching bands.

The Kawai ES 100 warranty is 3 years parts and labor, which is on the lower end compared to what even Kawai offers for other Digital Pianos its sells like those in the CP, CA, CS, and CN series.