Yamaha Arius YDP-144 Digital Piano - Classic and elegant home piano for beginners or hobbyists, in black

Product Information

What makes these digital pianos very similar are the full 88-key weighted keyboard, the functions and connectivity capabilities. While it doesn’t compare to the slimmer, more portable design of other keyboards, it’s still slim enough to fit into most apartment rooms without much hassle. Both digital pianos have the Graded Hammer Standard key action from Yamaha. It’s their basic key action. It’s not bad at all, but they can do better, I know that now.

To access more advanced features and settings, it requires a combination of buttons and piano keys. just to add that my daughter is also a singer, and uses the piano to accompany herself. She’s been popping her iPad or Surface Pro in front of herself at her keyboard for years and recording videos. )just in case this provides more context). Also, these 3 models have reverb special effects with 4 reverb variations which can add a some ambience/echo to the piano sound so that it will be a bit more "lively" and sound larger. Having reverb settings in a digital piano can be helpful to the overall piano and instrument sounds coming out of the piano and all major brands have this feature with some reverb effects being better than others.

DIGITAL PIANO KEY ACTIONS - 2023 REPORT

This is particularly noticeable when playing the same note in rapid succession and enables expressive control. While this is a common occurrence in most budget-friendly digital pianos (like the Kawai KDP110 and the Casio PX-870), it’s still quite unfortunate that Yamaha didn’t seek to improve on this aspect.

With the Yamaha YDP-144 and this useful feature, the Stereophonic Optimizer, this weakness seems to be a matter of the past. This technology enables you to play the piano with headphones on, and have a similar sound experience as you would when not using headphones. To be clearer, the sound you hear doesn’t seem to be in your ear, but rather coming from the piano, a surround sound, if you will. The experience is supposed to be as authentic and immersive as possible.

Slim Series

It seems grim for the YDP-164 in this comparison, but the main thing to remember is that the sound is king. The YDP-164 comes with Yamaha’s CFX samples, which makes up one of the best concert grand sounds on the market. Finally, you lose the USB audio interface tech from the YDP-164, which means you can’t easily record without an external interface.

Thanks for your comment. Digital piano nowadays are pretty well made. You shouldn’t have any problem with it in the next 10 years at least. Depends on the bundle you choose, it might also comes with a Yamaha branded bench. This however is not a very good bench. It’s not height adjustable and is not the most comfortable bench I’ve used. Overall, for about the same price, the Roland F-140r is a much more capable digital piano than the Yamaha YDP-144.

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Looking at the Yamaha YDP-144 vs Yamaha P125 from a functions point of view, I can’t see a lot of difference either. They both have all the basic functions you would expect from a modern digital piano, without having too many bells and whistles. You can record what you play so that you can listen to it later on and take note of any mistakes that you make. This, together with other functions such as metronome are very helpful for beginners. Not so spectacular for more advanced pianists, though.