Kawai ES920 vs. Yamaha P515

welcome to milan recording studios my name is james pavel shockross and in today's video we have two digital pianos and i have to be honest, it feels really good to be back in the studio reviewing professional level digital pianos and having them stacked on top . on top of each other like this reminds me of what I used to do on the channel a few months ago and it feels really good to do it again. It was one of my favorite things to review on the channel. Keyboard comparisons are. very fun, deep and very interesting to me, and I'm glad to be able to present the

kawai

i

es920

compared to the

yamaha

p515

.

Now the

kawai

i

es920

is basically a completely new instrument, which was recently released. A couple of months ago, I think it's scheduled for release in February, that's what I heard, but there are still some available for sale and I was actually able to purchase mine a little early if that February release date is really accurate. here we have the kawaii es920, the soon to be released kawaii digital piano that costs around 1500 US dollars or so and at the bottom here we have the

yamaha

p515

, which is not a new instrument, it has been available for at least a However, I think in a couple of years it's still definitely a great contender in that same price range, around $1500 US, and if someone was looking for a digital piano within that price range, today these would be two of your strongest options. kawaii s920 on top and yamaha p515 on the bottom.

This comparison is one that people have been asking for since the es920 was released. The es920 is the successor to the old es8, which was much loved by the digital piano community and I actually own it. one of those too, so in the future I'll do a comparison between the es920 and the es8, so if you're interested in that you might want to think about subscribing and I'll also have a standalone review just of the 920. So if you want to know more about this instrument, go see it. I'll probably go a little deeper into that video than this one because I'm comparing two digital pianos to that one.

Out of the way, let me talk about some of the things that come with these instruments and one of them that of course will come with them is not what you expected me to say, but it is the build quality, what the build quality is and The fit and finish as in both instruments. Well, for starters, both are pretty good, but in my opinion, one is definitely much better than the other. To start, on the Yamaha, you have a solid metal front key here on a real piano. I would call this a key slip, so I'll just call it a key slip.

You've got this solid metal key slide here that has no flex and has a really nice solid sound. And the side panels here are plastic, but they don't feel terribly cheap, they feel quite adequate, they feel solid. The top panel here has a nice faux wood strip here that has a nice solid sound and then the top panel here I think is plastic, but again it has a nice solid sound. Both it and its bottom are a large, solid sheet of some type of plastic that has a good quality sound, although there is a lot of plastic in this instrument and not as much metal as would have been found in, say, an old es8.

The build quality still feels good and it feels like a solid, durable instrument that if it had some kind of accident and fell on the floor or something it would definitely survive. It feels well built, although the es920 is a bit complicated. In my opinion, the story is different. The key here is plastic and feels really cheap and hollow and can even flex enough to touch the front of the keys. The top panel is plastic like the p515, but unlike the p515, I don't. I don't know, it doesn't have the same quality feel, the speaker grills are big and are actually made of metal, the little parts here, so that's cool, the back panel is also plastic, as expected , and the bottom is like a hollow sheet of plastic, which is really strange, so I'm personally a little disappointed with the build quality of the es920.

I was hoping that more kawaii has historically had stellar build qualities in their es line and others such as the mp series and the es920. I guess it's unprecedented low build quality in this series, that's not to say it's terrible, it's not horrible build quality, but I honestly expected more, especially for the price, this kind of build quality you get here with the hollow plastic um and the cheap kind of build quality that is more than what you would expect from a seven to eight hundred dollar digital piano, not something that costs 1500, it feels like a quality made instrument and yet it doesn't feel the same way.

It's not all bad about the es920 and we'll dive into the amazing sounds and good action and some of the other cool features of the es920 later in the video. Two more things I wanted to briefly discuss are the music desks that come. With these and the damper pedals, I have the music tables very conveniently here with me, let me take the Yamaha one here and also with the build quality of the Yamaha and this metal key, slide the bottom plate of this here. The music desk is solid metal and the whole thing has a really solid feel because of this metal, I would almost convince you that this part here is also made of glass, which is not plastic or plexiglass, but because of that solid metal when you pick up this and you use it, it feels really good and it's obvious that it's going to last a long time.

The plexiglass will yellow over time, so over time that will probably happen, but the build quality of this is excellent now, as with the build quality of the instruments themselves, this is the music desk for the es920 and the first thing I find funny is how similar they are, it's almost like Kawhi basically went with the yamaha p515, it looks good, let's make them look exactly the same. I can't get them to be parallel here, but as you can see here, they look very, very similar, which is which, well, the one with the Yamaha badge is obviously the Yamaha, um, but the p515 here has exactly the same aesthetic, but again, as with construction.

The quality of the instrument is cheaper. This bottom plate here is just cheap plastic, again it's ABS plastic, so again we have a cheaper build quality on the es920 than the p515. Nothing that I think would really be a deal breaker, but maybe for some of you want a good quality, sturdy digital piano to play on, you might want to think about the p515 vs the es920 because I think in terms of durability, the es920 might not. last as long as the p515. Let's also talk about the damper pedals. Let me grab. those are really fast, unlike the build quality of digital pianos and their music tables, the build quality of the damper pedals actually matches up very well.

The yamaha comes with a fc4a damper pedal which is excellent, has a solid metal bottom and good quality. plastic feel up here that is very durable the only issue I have with this, which is a little strange, is that you have these rubber feet that stick to the floor well but they have these little teeth and those teeth point over here, so when you have the pedal on the floor and you're pushing it with your foot, it's going to want to move this way, so the funny thing is that the damper pedal would prefer to move this way instead of this way because those feet with the little teeth here are pointing to the angle like this, if that makes any sense, if you flip them over, this thing would never move on a rug, um, so that would be an easy little fix for Yamaha, but as it is, it doesn't move at all and it works very, very good. well it has a bit more of a taut feel than the yamaha, i mean the kawaii pedal here which is their f10h, honestly i feel like i maybe prefer this one a bit.

I think the pedal feel is a little better. The build quality I think is maybe even better than the Yamaha, but that doesn't mean the Yamaha's pedal is bad, they are both excellent. Maybe I just have a slight preference for the Kawaii pedal. It's a really cool pedal and I'm glad to see that this hasn't changed from the previous models in the es line. It's a very good pedal and I hope Kawhi sticks with it for many years to come, so now that all that is out of the way I think it's time to get started. play these instruments, but as you can see, I'm a little bit far away from you and if I'm playing the keys and interacting with the instruments, it might be hard for you to see, so what I'm going to do is move around. the camera zooms in closer to get a little tighter shot and make the keyboards bigger and then we'll start playing and like I did in my previous videos, and one of my favorite fun things to do on the channel is change between the two instruments in the middle of the performance, so I'm going to play a little bit here and a little bit up here and it'll be a lot of fun and, almost honestly, I'm just going to play a little bit with the two preset sounds, the preset sound. of the p515 is a replica of their cfx grand and above here on the es920 is a replica of their sk concert grand now, in real life, the cfx and skex are the flagship acoustic pianos of the respective companies, so it will be interesting see how a digital reproduction of them represents the real instruments, so let's start playing them and I hope you enjoy listening to a lot of music on these two instruments.

There you have it, the cfx grand on the p515 and the sk concert grand on the yamaha. kawaii es920 this is what they sound like and as you can hear, they both sound very good and I think that's the conclusion we will find with this video: they are both quite capable and what's the word. I'm looking for both to be very capable instruments, that's what I'm trying to get at. They both have very good piano samples and I think at this level it's more personal taste, which would you prefer? which one is intrinsically better in sound quality uh with these particular patches um I think they're both excellent, they both serve their purposes and they're both slightly different um, the sk conscious grand, especially through the speakers, sounds very delicate and delicate , while the cfx thread sounds like it's made for raw power and really wants to project and get out there. um, the sk conjorgan has a kind of warm, soft, extraordinarily resonant sound.

Kawhi did a great job with the resonance, especially here on the same The last couple of octaves the tone is perfect, the tone is amazing and it's very good here too. Let me do a quick comparison between the pitch of those high notes. Let's see how it sounds, since you can hear the high pitch. ethereal on the es920 is really heavenly and open and really beautiful and sounds good on the yamaha, but i think in certain things it's a little better on the es920. I've heard I've seen some people online say they felt that way. The es920's sound was muddy and I don't think it's muddy at all.

I think that muddiness that some people might be hearing is that incredibly detailed, very realistic resonance, especially here in the treble, that a lot of digital panels don't have. that or you don't do it as well as these kawaii pianos do, so I think it might take some people a while to get used to learning how to pedal and really work on that resonance so that it sounds really really good, other really good. The piano patch on the p515 is this one down here, the businder for the patch, let me play a little bit of that and compare it to the sk conscious grand piano because it's a fan favorite on the internet.

The reinforcement patch is warm, thick, thick and soft. It doesn't work very well for everything, I'll be honest, but for certain types of music like Eric says that's all that sample needs to shine, it's really beautiful, so the sk conscious grand and the cfx and Honestly, the boost samples on the p515 and es920 are really fantastic, now there are other piano samples on these instruments, but for the duration of the video, I'm not going to go into any of the ones the cfx has, sorry the p515 has some. Less than the es920 the es920 has two different banks of different piano sounds.

You have the sk concert grand like the first one. You have the ex as the second. The third is a clean jazz. The fourth is a warm fifth. It's a pop grand piano and those are all of the first category and the second category, you have another one here, you have a sk5 grand piano, you have an upright piano, you have a pop two grand piano and I have a modern rock piano and then a background for the sk5, while this uh p515 only has the cfx the busendorffer studio grand bright grand ballad grand warm grand pop grand jazz grand rock grand and finally honky tonk piano forte, so those are all the piano sounds and, Honestly, they are all pretty good, especially in the case of the es920, they all pale in comparison to that first sound because that first sound is amazing in my opinion, but that doesn't mean that the other piano sounds the es920 are bad, I just find I like the default sound so much that it's honestly the only one I use.

Othersound category of the es920 is electric pianos and this one has that type of sound too, but before we dive into that, I thought I would talk about a few things about these instruments, the playing experience and a couple of other things like the speakers, for which the internal speakers of both are quite good. To some extent the p515 has a lot more volume when you play that cfx sample. and you are hitting it very loud, it rivals the volume of a real acoustic piano is very impressive and the es920 has a slightly finer, clearer and more delicate type of sound, but still has some volume behind it.

The only problem is the distortion on certain tones, especially on electric pianos, the lower notes. and especially with organs, you get a lot of distortion from the speakers. This is true for both. I feel like that wasn't as true when I first bought my p515 or maybe I just didn't play the same things. What happened was when I bought my es920 and was playing with it. I noticed that certain things triggered the speakers and made them act badly and when I do those same things on the p515, the same things happen sometimes to a lesser degree, sometimes to a greater degree. the sounds are different, the speakers are different, so they behave in slightly different ways, but you will get some distortion with low organ notes and low electric piano notes, but that's what seems to be standard with a lot of the digital pianos I would like to see them improved, for the price you are paying for these you really shouldn't have any distortion, especially since these speakers are loud enough to probably use in some small live settings, if you are playing it for some kind of recital for 10, 15, 20 people, the speakers alone on this would probably fill the room enough for people to hear it, so you wouldn't really want distortion on these, um, but again in a live situation if you're playing for something bigger, you'd probably hook them up to a PA system and an amplifier and bypass the internal speakers or use them for monitoring for your own purposes, so it's a give and take, is what it is, um, but that one The situation is that the internal speakers are louder on the p515, they are a little cleaner and more delicate here on the es920 but in both cases they do the job.

The other thing I wanted to talk about is the action of both. Very, very nice, the Yamaha down here actually has keys with wood sides, which is really cool and that gives these keys a more realistic feel, whereas the ones here almost feel more liquid. They feel very solid and very planted when you play them, even when playing fast passages you feel locked into the keys, you know exactly what you want to do, but here on the es920 they feel a bit more, what's the word hesitant? In some ways they feel a little looser and that's not necessarily because of the action it is and it's not the same feeling of having a loose action, it's the same feeling I get when I play a real acoustic piano that has a light action compared to it. with one that has a heavier action, I personally find that heavier actions are more controllable, especially when they respond well and that is the case with this p515, although it is a little heavier than the es920, it responds very very quickly, you can do it. trills tremolos convert all of that very, very quickly and very easily on the p515, although there's probably a bit more of a learning curve and adjustment to learn how to get the most out of the action of this versus the action of this the action of the es920 is very It is lightweight, very fluid and has no problems playing any type of music either.

I just prefer playing music at high volume faster on the p515 and that's my personal preference. The other thing I wanted to discuss here is noise. The action is done if we play some notes with the volume off on both pianos and you simply listen to the sound that the keys make, what you will hear is that one of them is particularly quieter than the other and let's listen here. So there you have it, as you can hear the downward attack, the sound the key makes when it hits the bottom of the base of the key is almost the same on both, in fact it's quieter on the kawaii one and that's a very acceptable noise level that I don't have.

If I have a problem with that, what I do have is the way the keys bounce on the es920 and that's not because I'm playing, you know, six different keys and they all appear at a slightly different time if I do the same thing . There's no bounce down here, it's very quiet when it comes up, so that's something that this particular action that Kawhi's rh3 has dealt with for many years. I'm a little surprised that those Kawaii people haven't solved it. The only one who has complained about the bounce and noise this action makes, but that's really the only flaw I can think of other than that, it's very, very good to play and feels wonderful to play, so let's move on to the electric piano. category and I'm going to do something similar to what I did with the piano.

I'll just go through them all. I'm going to try to match them because they both have road sounds. They both have swirling sounds. Of them have dx sounds and I'm going to try to compare them with each other. The es920 has more Rhodes sounds than the um p515, so some of them may not match each other, but I'll do my best to move on. and find all the matching sounds and compare them to each other, so let's start here with the stage electric piano and the classic electric piano on both, it's a fender rhodes type sound, let's see how it sounds. those are the electric piano sounds of the p515 and es920.

I think I covered them all there, like I said, not all of them match. There are a couple of extras to the dx sound on the p515. There are a couple of additional paths. sounds here but I tried to compare them to their equivalents, um, so you can hear that, in my opinion, I think a lot of the kawaii electric piano sounds are a little bit better, the way sounds a little rougher and has a little bit There some extra noises that make it sound a little more authentic, neither really replace the real Fender Rhodes obviously, but I think the es920 sounds a little better overall than the p515 in this sound category in my opinion in particular. like, uh, what's the name of the soft ep on the p505, the one with that really slow auto pan thing that's really cool, um down here on the p515 and up here on the es920, probably my favorite is the electric piano from the aughts 60, the first version of Es that I ended up playing on, uh, that last part, that's probably my favorite electric piano sound from the es920.

It's like a wordless or 200a type of sound, very thick, very warm and really very nice sounding. The next category here is probably the weaker of the two. of these keyboards and that would be the organ category, the organ category is not the idea or the goal of these instruments, they are digital pianos, not digital organs, so it does not make sense that the organ category is the weakest and have some of the weaker sounds once again i think the es920 is a little better in some aspects in this category than the p515 but in another aspect the p515 is the es920 has no competition in other categories so let me play a pair of chords each organ sound of each instrument again, there are actually six organ sounds up here and five organ sounds up here, so they won't quite line up and they won't try to emulate the same type of organ all the time, but I Les I'll give you an idea of ​​what they sound like and you can hear how strange it sounds.

Those are the organ sounds of the p515 and the es920 and the tone wheel organs are a little better on the es920 in my opinion. than on the p515, but the pipe organ sounds are dramatically better on the p515 than the es920 and I noticed that people don't buy them for the pipe organ sounds, but it's still fun, especially the last one . on the p515 the oregon tutti is really fat, rich, sounds big and sounds really cool while the last one on the kawaii was hilariously cheesy and sounds like a 90s sound file so there you have it, those are the ones organ sounds.

In my opinion it's not really the strong point of either of them, but on the Yamaha the pipe organ sounds are really cool and on the kawaii s920 the tone wheel sounds are pretty good for some reason on the kawaii The organ sounds are down an octave as you could hear, that threw me off a little bit, I'm not really sure why, but they are there, so there you have it below, it's kind of a miscellaneous category for both instruments, um, this on the kawaii is labeled harpsichord and mallets and at the bottom it's labeled simply clavinet and vibraphone so we'll check that out in a moment here so those are all the sounds in the clavinet, vibraphone, harpsichord and mallet section of these instruments and as you can. look it's basically the same thing, the es920 has a marimba in there and it's an artificial marimba that sounds pretty good and other than that they're basically the same, you've got two different variants of the harpsichord down here. an electric harpsichord or clavinet on both and then you have the lovely vibraphone, honestly everything here is pretty good.

I think the harpsichord samples here are a little better than here on the es920, but other than that, those two sound groups. In my opinion, they are quite equivalent. Next we have the string section and chorus. I think it's a little bigger on the p515 than the es920, but I'm not sure I haven't compared these two in depth, so I'm doing it live on camera right now, so the first default sound here It's just a sound of strings. I know that one is very different on the p515 versus the es920. Upstairs it's more of a string pad and down here it's more like a It's not a string solo, but it has those vibes.

It's like a smaller group of instruments, so I'm going to scroll through all of them. They're not going to line up with each other, but I'm going to go through them all. them and just play them back and forth and scroll through all the different sounds and you guys can see what they sound like, so oh boy boom, those are the string sections and pads of both instruments and once again, they're pretty equivalent. is not the main focus of these instruments and I think they are both quite good. I like the string sounds of es. I feel sorry for the p515 more than the es920.

But I think they're both fine. The final category here is the foundations. Yamaha has a couple of extra guitars here, but most are bases. The bases are in a different order, so I'll try to line them up so you know the upright acoustic bass and the electric bass and things like that, so stop. I lay it out real quick here and then once I do it, let's see how they sound, do it, there you have it, those are all the sounds of the p515 and the es-920, at least all the main ones. There are actually a ton of hidden sounds on the p515 that you can also access, but for the duration of this video, I'm not really going to delve into any of them, but from what I understand, those sounds were often used Often found in earlier Yamaha models like the DGX series and such, so there are actually a lot of sounds hidden within this instrument, now I think it's time to talk about some of the other smaller nuances of these instruments, such as transposition and division and recorder, because both Now I have a built-in recorder, the one built into the Yamaha is much simpler and has far fewer features than the one here for the 920.

On the 920 you can not only stop, record and go back to the beginning. but you can also fast forward and rewind and there's even an ab looper but it's definitely not perfect and down here on the p515 you can just make recordings and listen to them, but up here there's a bit more functionality but like I said it's buggy. I'll cover it in my full review of the kawaii es920. The problem I have with ab loopers. If you want to see more of that, watch that video. Both also have a rhythm section that has accompaniment. modes also the one on the kawaii is a little fancier and has more accompaniments, while the one on the p515 just has a single note based on the root, which i prefer because the accompaniments on the kauai es920 get in the way in my opinion.

Luckily what you're really trying to play is turning off the accompaniments, it's as simple as pressing that button right there, and on the p515 you have to dive into a menu to turn off that one bass note that doesn't really get in the way. and it's barely noticeable, so you can do it if you want that's what happens with the p515, do a lot of things on it, you have to dive into a lot of different menus, none of the menu functions on these instruments are perfect, they both have their own functions. Weird little things, um, but you have to dig a little into the menu for both.

I think there is a bit more of that on the p515, the es920 also has a better screen and is really nice. I think it's an OLED screen that has really great viewing angles and you can see it from all angles, it's very bright, the contrast is great and although it uses one of those older LCD LED type screens that people have been using for years , it's one of the best, yesnot the best. There are many on the market and I don't have any major problems with this, it just has a slightly more modern and higher class aesthetic.

You have a built-in metronome, like I said. Let's see here how you turn it. here, wow, on the p5105, if you have a metronome which is very good, on the es110 you have a very simple metronome, the es1, I called it 110. The es920 defaults to that ping at the beginning, while the p515. It doesn't have the ping many people prefer to be included oh what else is there that I want? talk about this it has a piano room that allows you to change the position of the piano lid the brightness of the hammers uh what else but not the sensitivity by touch the room reverb the reverb depth the master tuning of the instrument the damper vrm resonance chain resonance aliquot resonance body resonance all these things and this actually does the same type of thing if you go to the menu you press val you actually press menu a couple of times there you press it once and you get a virtual technician and then when hit value, which is kind of like your input, then you can go in here and change your touch curve, you can change the voice, the damper resonance, damper noise, string resonance, undamped resonance, cabinet resonance, key off effect, recoil noise, hammer noise, hammer delay, top open board positions decay time release time minimum touch equal temperament and its temperament change the stretching tunes the sensitivity curve and then some other things so now there's a lot of customization in both unfortunately and this applies to both I think um because when you get to the room of the piano, it takes you to a piano sound on the p515 and the virtual technician features are only available on the best I can tell about piano sounds, um, electric pianos, although they do have hammer recoil noise and delay of the hammer which on higher end models like the mp11 you can alter on this one, you can't alter those with the electric pianos, at least from what I tested, I tried reducing the hammer recoil noise on the preset roads using the virtual technician and it just doesn't it worked, which is fine, the extra noises, the extraneous noises, you know, the hammer noises and such, in my opinion, are perfectly tuned on the es920, the only thing that could be a little too loud maybe would be the noise which the shock absorbers do when you press the pedal, but it's definitely not offensive and you can go in and lower it if you want.

I think that's pretty much all I wanted to say about the p515 and the es920, they are two very similar digital pianos and it's a little clear to me that Kawhi has definitely taken some cues from Yamaha in my opinion. At this point, digital pianos have arrived at the store I am looking for, as a continuity, each digital piano will have the same type of features and in a sense, they will look the same as modern cars, they all have the same type of shape in most cases because they are all trying to achieve maximum aerodynamics, if that makes any sense they are all a similar shape, at least to the consumer.

Level cars do it and it's pretty much the same with digital pianos, they all have the same functions, they all have the same features and after a certain point they all start to be the same, for example on the es920 you have two connectors for headphones. Here and on the p515 Wow, you have two headphone jacks. Here are the differences: you have a mini-jack and a quarter-inch jack. You only have two quarter-inch connectors here, so it's a good quality of life. switch here, both have a panel lock function. If you look up on the instrument panel, you will see that the two rightmost buttons, excluding the volume slider and the power button, if you press both at the same time, you will get the panel lock, which means that you can press buttons and change anything and nothing will really change on the instrument.

The two rightmost buttons on the p515, if you press them at the same time, you will get the panel lock, so there are certain things and then the design of the music desk which is very similar and the all black aesthetic of both with the speakers on the side and the little strip here that separates the speakers from the keys, you know, there's a lot of things about these that make them very very similar um and that's why people wanted me to compare them because they occupy the same niche in the niche niche they occupy the same area in the digital piano market they do a lot of the same things and that's what I wanted to cover in today's video, the p515 versus the es920, so which is better for you?

Well, honestly, they're both pretty similar. I'm not even sure which one I would lean towards more. I really love the es920 sk concert grand sampler, but the business and cfx are really good too. I prefer the action for most things on the p515. Honestly, the action of the es920 is not entirely perfect. You have that noise problem. You also have the fact that shutdown creates something like that. a rubbery feeling towards the end of the key when you try to play pianissimo, not a huge problem um, but at least not as bad as it was before in previous versions of the rh3 action, but it's definitely noticeable in the rh3 action.

That's why Nord on their Nord Grand which uses this same action the only thing they change that everyone can see on the internet is removing that fake little rubbery thing that makes you feel if that makes any sense so basically it's the p515 vs es920 I honestly feel like it mostly depends on my personal preference. I like both of them. In my opinion, both have the same number of advantages and disadvantages. Honestly they are probably the two most equivalent digital pianos on the market today which is honestly great for both because I loved the p515 and I definitely liked the old es8 and the fact that the es920 I actually think competes even more with the p515 It's definitely a good sign for Kawhi's build quality which I would like to see improved and the action which I would like to see finally improved after all these years, but overall the es920 is a pretty solid instrument and I don't think you can go wrong with it and the same could be said for the p515 that's finally all I wanted to say.

I really hope you enjoyed this video and if you did, you might want to check out my channel. I have a lot of cool videos of acoustic pianos, digital pianos, and all kinds of other cool stuff. and if you want to see an in-depth comparison between the es920 and its predecessor, the es8, definitely check out my channel. I will also have a separate es920 video where I go a little deeper into things, so I hope you guys liked this video, if you did, you can go check out my channel if you do, thank you very much and I'll see you in the next video, bye bye.