I've lusted after these beautiful red instruments for over a decade. I would always play them in music stores and have fun with the knobs and sounds.
My goal was to produce a silent practice station with headphones for acoustic piano (Jazz + Classical) and Rhodes (Jazz). I thought I had a good (read: expensive) solution: stack a Nord Stage 3 Compact on top of a Kawai VPC-1. Use the VPC-1 for keys and the Nord for sounds. Perfect...or so I thought.
I have a very nice grand piano, but it lights up the whole house--great when I am playing nice sounding music but less great when I am playing scales, or the same measure twenty times, or it's midnight. I also have a Rhodes MkI, and it's fun to play, but not to practice on. Playing one of these is an exercise in historical re-enactment. The action is slow and clunky, the voicing isn't so even, even when these things are "perfect", and it wants to be coupled with a guitar amp and driven kind of hard, which makes it loud.
As a consequence of having high-end instruments already, and the fact that I work with sound/audio for a living, I'm probably a bit more snobbish about the sound quality and authenticity than most. Consider yourself warned
I figured that Nord has a great reputation for sound when it comes to both of these instruments, and could be paired with headphones for quiet play. I could eventually explore the synth and tonewheel sections and have some fun / broaden horizons. So I ordered the Nord Stage 3 compact and a Kawai VPC-1.
By this weekend, everything had arrived, and I put it together.
The VPC-1 is great...but the Nord was a huge disappointment..
First, the piano sounds suck. None of them constitute a serviceable acoustic piano simulation when played through headphones. The Yamaha Motif XS workstation that I bought thirteen years ago sounds better than this with a fraction of the compute resources. The Roland RD-2000 that my father uses also sounds better. I honestly can't figure out why they are so bad or how, but they don't stand up to scrutiny at all, and doubly-so for classical music. They sound thin and boxy at the same time. They don't evoke the instruments that they are supposed to sound like. It's weird how bad they are given the good reputation. My guess is--they build these for pop/rock performance via a PA system or when "cutting through the mix" with a bunch of other instruments and not for people playing acoustic art music by themselves.
Second, the way they manage audio processing headroom sucks. The Nord board has a large collection of effects, amp simulators, layering capabilities, and the like which can make things very loud. Obviously they don't want clipping, so they make the sections themselves fairly quiet, even at maximum volume. This creates a problem where if you're just using a naked piano sound, they've attenuated it so much that the sound quality is harmed. There just isn't enough dynamic range above the noise floor to reproduce an acoustic piano well.
Third, the headphone amp sucks. It's weak and prone to distortion. It can't drive relatively easy cans like HD650s at a reference listening level, and forget about the really nice ones. I ended up pairing it with a proper headphone amp and that sort of helped, but the output was still too quiet even over line level because of the headroom issue, and to get it to a reasonable listening volume on a naked piano sound resulted in a not-so-black background.
One thing that it absolutely nailed was the Rhodes MkI sound. I was able to plug it into the same amp as my Rhodes and make them sound bang-on identical with a little tweaking. That was pretty cool.
I didn't love the semi-weighted keybed, but I knew that was going to happen going in--that's why I paired it with the VPC-1. The lightweight keys were fun for screwing around with organs/synths, but it's inadequate for piano/e-piano.
For now, I will be using the VPC-1 with Pianoteq 6 and I'm sure I'll miss the fun knobs a little bit, but they weren't worth the astronomical price or the fact that this thing can't accomplish my main goals. It's not perfect, but it is dramatically better and feels a lot more like playing a piano. If anyone has other recommendations for piano simulation software, particularly anything that can be run in a binaural/player-perspective manner, I'm willing to try some more stuff.
Anyways--I feel like I watched 500 reviews of this thing and none of them said any of this stuff, so I'm putting it out there. I think for a lot of people--especially people playing with bands and lugging it around public transportation, this board is great. It packs a TON of capability into a compelling package that is great for real-time performance. It's just too bad they couldn't get some of the basics right.
