I recently purchased my first Nord product – a Nord Stage 3 – and I'm already deeply in love with it! With that said, there were a couple twists and turns on my journey towards owning this beast, mostly thanks to Guitar Center's choice to sell me an open-box floor model as a "new" keyboard the first time around. I took that home, found some scratches and dents, and took it back to swap it for an in-box model... and in doing so made some interesting observations.
First, the touch between the two was noticeably different; the first one was a little more abrupt, and may have even been lighter than the second. The first also made more key noise when releasing the keys; this second board is buttery smooth. Honestly, neither touch is notably
better, but I just thought it was interesting that they were so different.
Second, and most notably, the piano equalizer module was different between the two keyboards!
- Piano 1.png (5.68 KiB) Viewed 1726 times
- Piano 2.png (5.86 KiB) Viewed 1726 times
I've found two versions of the manual that reflect these differences,
one with brill/treb/soft and
one with the dyno settings. The latter is the one linked from Nord's download page, and
they just released their dyno filters, so I think this must be the most recent build of the keyboard. I was a little concerned by the fact that my new one had a 1.x version of the OS on it to start, but that might just be how they ship even the freshest models.
TL;DR, Nord is manufacturing slightly different versions of the Stage 3 under the same name! I haven't seen this noted anywhere else online so it seemed worth mentioning here, even if it doesn't change your life at all.
Cheers!
