Fortunately, there isn’t too many built-in sounds and functions, so soon enough you will remember the combinations you use most often. Yamaha has set up the reverbs with some light damping in the high end to avoid the overly ‘sparkly’ sounds you’d expect from a poorly tuned reverb.

Apart from that both digital pianos that I compare today have full 88-key keyboards with 4 levels of touch sensitivity. That is soft, medium, hard or off. They also have plastic keys without the ebony and ivory feel tops, but the risk of your fingers sliding off the keys when playing longer is reduced by the matte finish. It’s not as good as the ebony tops but it offers pretty good grip when your fingers start to sweat. Functions The feel of the keys is what you would expect at this level of quality. The keys will feel lighter on the high end, and progressively heavier towards the lower end. This mimics the feeling of an acoustic piano’s keyboard very well.The key action in the YDP-S54 and YDP164 are identical and that key action is called GH3 (graded weighted hammer with 3 key sensors per key). This key action in these two models have a much heavier/firmer key action touch when pressing down the keys. The force it takes to get the keys to go down is much heavier in the GH3 key action as opposed tom the GHS and heavier/firmer than all of the competition and in my opinion that is not necessarily a good thing. Too much down-weight (touch weight) when your fingers are pressing down on the keys can create fatigue in the fingers, hands, and wrists especially for young children, older people, and those people with issues with finger movement. The other brands and models in this general price range such as Kawai, Korg, Casio, and The third piano acoustic piano sound, is the Pop Grand Piano sound. This setting is great for all of you who love playing songs of the likes of Elton John and other pop artists that use piano heavily in their music. It has a slight jazzy vibe to it, and it’s a lot of fun. A more interesting feature though, for those who can use the Smart Pianist app is the Chord Chart. This feature analyzes any song that you would like to play along on the piano and displays chord symbols on the screen. A great way to make practicing piano even more fun. Yamaha YDP-144 vs Yamaha YDP-164

It samples Yamaha’s flagship 9 foot concert grand piano CFX. The result is a truly pleasant experience to the ear. The same applies to the Fender Rhodes-style electric piano. Unlike KORG and Roland, Yamaha never captured the bite of the Mark II Fender Rhodes. Reverb intensities can be modified in increments of one, affecting the room/hall size and decay times of the reverb to suit the needs of the song. This Smart Pianist app lets you see colorful musical icons and a variety of settings that are clearly accessed from the color touch screen of your device so that you can access and control the Arius features in ways that allow you to use these functions and features that you otherwise may not use. Besides that, there are other very cool musical things this app allows you to do that are not already built into the pianos such as being able to display digital sheet music of songs in the piano and being able to play along with them along with being able to important MP3 files into the app to learn the chord accompaniments and play along.In early 2019, Yamaha updated the YDP line with new models, including the YDP-144, YDP-164 and YDP-S54 (slim, modern style version of the YDP-164), replacing the previous YDP-143, YDP-163 and YDP-S52 models. Can you use it with the Yamaha YDP-144? Of course you can. This is a great advantage because it makes everything a more fun. You also get a number of extra features that you may or may not utilize. But how does it work? Look to Roland’s consistently updated SuperNATURAL modeling/sampling hybrid sound engine and it’ll be easy to see why. Even so, Yamaha didn’t rest on its laurels. A very interesting feature, that might be considered by some a matter of finesse, is the Stereophonic Optimizer. I feel that Yamaha really missed a great opportunity to offer built-in Bluetooth support, especially since many of their competitors often offer this as a standard feature.

Those 2 models have the same two smaller speakers within the piano cabinet but the power amplifiers go up to two 20 watt amps for a total of 40 watts which is slightly more than 2 times the power of the YDP-144, and that's a good thing.You can record up to two parts per song. This is particularly helpful when you want to record individual left- or right-hand parts for practice. You can even turn off individual recorded parts using key combinations. The Korg C1’s highlight is the RH3 key action, ripped straight from Korg’s flagship stage pianos and workstations (like the ubiquitous Korg Kronos). This is arguably the best key action on digital pianos up to the intermediate price range. Alternatively, you may want to take a look at the Yamaha YDP-S34, which is identical to the YDP-144 in terms of functionality but comes in a more compact form-factor.