REVIEW - Kawai ES100 Portable Digital PIano - Recommended as a Best Buy!

REVIEW - Kawai ES100 88-key portable hammer weighted digital piano - Recommended as a "best buy" at $799US internet price - The Kawai piano company of Japan has been producing digital pianos (and acoustic pianos) for decades and is well known & respected world-wide for building high quality instruments that piano teachers, professional pianists, universities/colleges, and recording studios recommend. I personally know many people who own Kawai acoustic & digital pianos but Kawai has not been a brand that has offered a digital piano priced under $1000 in the past. You would have had to spend more money or purchase a different brand.

ES100 with optional stand & pedals

The new 2014 model Kawai ES100 that just came out ($799US internet discount price) is part of the "ES series" of digital pianos and offers similar quality to the higher priced ES pianos, but at a much lower price point. This little baby is definitely not a toy! I recently got a chance to play the ES100 and was able to thoroughly check it out. The piano is offered in the US in a satin black color only and the design is sleek, elegant, and simple with eight small round push buttons and one volume slider control on the top above the keys near the left side. The buttons are solid, easy to push, and there is enough space in between the buttons so they're not all
jammed together. Also, there are no speakers or speaker grill cloth showing on the top of the piano...just a nice slightly curved top and clean lines with a large included music rack...a well thought out design considering how much this piano can actually do and how big the sound is. The piano is relatively small and lightweight and you can move it pretty easily by itself with no stand. It is only 52" wide and 11" deep so doesn't take up much space.

I did not have high expectations when I first tried it out because of the low price and I thought that Kawai would have to make some drastic compromises to produce a good digital piano at $799 that would also be up in quality to their higher priced ES models. Well I am happy to say that I was wrong and that Kawai greatly exceeded my expectations. The ES100 was obviously designed to do a few things extremely well in its price range and that include having a noticeably superior and sturdy (and quiet going both up & down) heavy duty graded hammer key action movement (Kawai calls it AHAIV-F Advanced Hammer Action), great acoustic stereo acoustic piano sound reproduction with  smooth velocity response, natural tonal dynamics, and a fairly even volume balance across the entire keyboard, as well as solid piano pedaling performance. It is worth noting that each note of all 88 keys was individually sampled from a Kawai acoustic grand piano as opposed to being sampled (recorded) from an acoustic piano in groups of notes. Sampling in groups of notes at one time like many other brands do is a less expensive way of getting a piano sound reproduction. But the Kawai ES100 had every key sampled one at a time...and the resulting piano sound in my opinion is amazing for the price, as I just mentioned.

The ES100 does offer many other features which I will talk about below, but this model was obviously built for the primary purpose of offering the best digital piano playing experience (in a portable model) a person can find under $1000 and it includes 192-notes of piano polyphony memory (a good thing) which is the highest in its class in this price range.  The internal speaker system is surprisingly full and loud with a total of 14 watts going through two higher quality speakers which are positioned underneath the keyboard. I put the piano speaker system through its paces and the sound was clean, did not distort even at loud volume, and was full from left to right across the stereo field. The overall volume is plenty for a medium sized room and it's got fairly good bass response for a small portable piano. However you can connect external speakers if you want to enhance the sound further.

ES100 control panel

The ES100 does not have hundreds of instrument sounds, USB flash drive input or USB output, automatic accompaniment styles, multi-track recording, user display screen, duet four hand mode, etc, etc. It is obviously not meant for that which is fine because it is focused primarily on piano playing. It has 8 acoustic piano tones which is a lot, along with a variety of impressive sounding strings, organs, electric pianos, harpsichord, and a few other tones. All of these extra instrument tones are exceptional at this price and better in my opinion than the competition for those specific tones. One very cool extra feature the ES100 offers is a drum rhythm section. Playing piano along with a drummer is a fun thing to do and also good training for rhythm and timing and allows a person to experience what it is like to play piano along with a drummer. The ES100 offers 100 different drum rhythms in nearly every type of rhythm style imaginable, and these drum percussive sounds are exceptionally realistic at this price. It really does sound like your playing along with a real drummer. I happen to personally enjoy doing that and use drum rhythms in teaching my students how to "feel the music" as opposed to only using a metronome for timing and drum rhythms are very useful in that way, especially when you can vary the tempo (faster/slower) and volume as you can on the ES100.

But all the drum rhythms in the world, automatic chord arrangements, extra sounds, or the latest USB technology is useless in my opinion if you do not have a realistic piano playing experience with a solid key action and good smooth dynamic acoustic piano tone. Although piano touch and tone is ultimately a subjective thing, when you compare a digital piano to a real acoustic piano there needs to be some definite similarities so the result is not completely subjective. There needs to be proper key weighting but not too much weight or too little weight. There needs to be a good piano tone but that tone needs to come with a good dynamic range so the sound is different as you are playing softer or harder. Dynamics are difficult to recreate evenly and with a large tonal range but Kawai ES100 seems to do a very god job of this and noticeably better than any new Yamaha digital piano I have played under $1500, so that ability is quite impressive to me.

Kawai ES100 included damper pedal

Then there is the damper sustain pedal which is sometimes overlooked as being important when shopping for a piano. The piano pedal that is included with the ES100 is a single heavy duty metal piano style pedal that also activates whats known as "half-pedaling." Half-pedaling is the ability to have a medium amount of sustain decay time when pressing the pedal down half way. The typical smaller plastic foot pedals that come with other brands can only offer an on/off sustain experience which is the way keyboards behave, but not real pianos. The sustain decay time when holding down the pedal and playing the piano keys is quite long and holds up well across the keyboard which was impressive to me. The longer decay times helps when playing more legato passages of music especially in classical pieces so even more advanced students and players will appreciate that. The included Kawai damper sustain pedal retails for $80 so it is not an inexpensive item to be included and brings the value of the ES100 up even more than it already is. The ES100 can also be connected to a
furniture style stand and a 3-pedal assembly which connects to the the stand which then makes the ES100 look somewhat more like a compact cabinet piano (although it does not have a sliding cover which portables do not). The internet discount price of the Kawai stand & 3-pedal unit together is $230 (pedal board & stand sold separately) but that is optional and not necessarily something you need to buy, but they do make the piano look nice, especially with the pedals being a chrome color, quite attractive. Yamaha & Casio also offer an optional furniture stand and 3 pedal unit for their lower priced digital pianos (P105, PX150) which is a good thing. The triple pedal units on all these pianos also supports the half-pedal mode. I did notice that the Kawai pedals were made out of metal instead of plastic as found on other brands and the ES100 pedal assembly and cross bar were thicker and seemed to be more durable than most. Also there is a large height adjustment screw under the pedals to adjust for carpet or hard floors so the price of the ES100 pedal assembly is definitely worth it based on its construction.

ES100 control panel

One of the most interesting things about the ES100 that I found is that you can edit the built in piano sounds in a variety of ways (using a menu key chart) and create your own personal custom piano tones that your own ears like:). Once you make those changes and edit the sounds which are fairly easy to do, then you can save those new sounds in 5 memories (4 panel memories plus a power-on user memory). In other words, what ever you do to the sounds including layering two sounds together, splitting two distinct sounds on either side of the keyboard, changing reverb, voicing, touch velocity curve, EQ, brightness, mellowness, and other functions. you can save those new settings so they can be recalled later by touch a button in 4 panel memories. That is a very cool feature and something not available on the Yamaha, Casio, and Roland models for their traditional low priced digital pianos. As an example, if you edited the piano sound to your liking and then mixed it with an organ sound, you could save that setting to be easily recalled later while you are playing the piano. Otherwise you have to recreate the entire setup(s) every time you turn on the piano, which is no fun.

acoustic piano dampers/strings

The ES100 also has some interesting additional functions built in which give the acoustic piano sound an even more realistic tone than it already has. One of the functions is called pedal resonance which means that which you press the pedal down you can hear the sound of the "virtual strings" echo or resonate just like in a real piano when the pedal is held down. This is not the normal sustain you find on most digital pianos when depressing the pedal (which the ES100 does have), but also a natural organic string resonation that is in additional to sustain. You can control the amount of resonation of the strings from a control function when pressing down the pedal, so that it is not too much or too little, something that the competitive brands in this price range cannot do.

acoustic grand piano hammers

Two other acoustic piano type features in the ES100 that are also digitally adjustable are called mechanical fallback hammer noise and damper rail noise. This is the mechanical sound of the damper rail and the key action in an acoustic piano when you let go of the pedal or let go of the keys when pressing down and the noise that is made when the parts go back to resting position. Rather than getting too complex about this (I don't like complexity and it's easy to that with this stuff) let's just say that these "noises" give you the feeling you are playing a  more organic sounding piano because you hear mechanical noise coming out of the ES100 speakers and those noises were originally recorded from a real acoustic piano and are then heard through the ES100 speakers (or through headphones). For me personally having those features is an interesting and stimulating  listening & piano playing experience, although I would say it's not absolutely necessary having all these additional piano/damper sound features to enjoy playing a digital piano. But the more realistic the overall piano sound is, the more likely you will enjoy it as you progress in your piano skills or are an accomplished player.

The ES100 does have a built-in digital recorder which offers one track of full piano recording and a 3-song memory to save your recorded songs. This is generally sufficient for most people although some of the competitors have a 2 track recorder separate left & right hand recording. Two separate tracks of recording is a nice feature and I would have wanted to see that in the ES100, but it is not absolutely essential. Most people just want to hear what they sound like regardless of whether the left & right hand are recorded altogether or individually. However, the ES100 does have a built-in music education lesson library consisting of Alfred's basic piano library of songs books 1A and 1B (a very popular lesson book series) along with Burgmuller 25 Etudes. With the built-in music library in the piano you can purchase the appropriate music books and then play along with the built in songs at any tempo you wish
(slower or faster) and also separate out the left hand and right hand parts for playback with controls in the piano accessed by the function button and keys. In this way you if you are a beginner or novice player you can listen to left and right hand parts separately (before you play the song yourself) to understand how each part sounds and to then play each part one at a time along with the song playing back. It's a pretty cool feature and one that you can take advantage of if you are a beginner young person or adult. Kawai is the only digital piano under $1000 with this kind of built-in lesson song library, but even if you never use this function, it doesn't really matter because this instrument is really all about playing the piano and having it be the one of the best you can get for a portable 88 key digital piano under $1000.

For those people that might want to play the piano in a very large room, outdoors, at a school, in a church, or other venue, you can connect the ES100 to an external speaker system by way of a stereo output on the piano in one of the two headphone connectors. When you connect in this way you can also decide if you want the internal piano speakers to remain on or not because otherwise the internal speakers would not work under normal circumstances when you plug into a headphone output. But the ES100 has an override function that allows the internal speakers to remain on...very nice. I do wish the ES100 had a USB output to iPad/computer as well as an audio input...that would have been useful. But some people do ask
for MIDI connectors (to connect to other sound modules, etc) which it does have, and you can always purchase a low cost adapter cable to convert a MIDI connector to a USB cable connector so that you can connect the piano to an iPad/computer at that point and use some fun interactive apps for creative visual learning and music playing. I use iPad apps in my studio quite a bit so I would definitely suggest that. Another feature the ES100 does not have is ivory feel key tops which Casio does have as well as Roland under $1000. Although some people do like that and it can be nice, it is not absolutely necessary and real acoustic pianos these days (and have for many years) use regular white hard plastic keytops and not ivory, so that material (simulated or organic) is not something you would see on a regular piano anyway.

For the money it is my opinion that the new Kawai ES100 overall is the new "home run king" of low priced portable digital pianos for piano sound and key action without question. In my opinion the key action is noticeably smoother and more realistic than the Yamaha GHS and GH key action found in the lower and higher priced Yamaha DGX and Arius models (including Clavinova CLP430/440 GH3), Roland ivory-G action, and a few other brands. Key action movement and realism is the number one feature to focus on in a piano and the only other digital piano brand which offers a fairly realistic key action in the low price range in my opinion is Casio, and I have done reviews of those pianos which you can read about on my blog. When you put it all together having a quiet quality hammer key action, a large amount piano polyphony memory, smooth touch, elegant piano tone and combine it with all the other features I mentioned in a sleek, elegant little portable cabinet weighing in at only 33lbs (without stand and extra 3-pedal unit), you have a real winner, especially with the name Kawai attached to it.

Kawai ES100 with opt stand & pedals

It is worth noting that I have had many people ask me about 88-key digital portable pianos (without a lot of "bells & whistles") for around the $500 (approx) price range. There is a variety of choices out there including the Yamaha P35, Yamaha P105, Casio CDP120, CDP220, PX150, Korg SP170S, SP280 and Suzuki SL1. But I would suggest that you consider moving up in price to the new Kawai ES100 ($799 internet discount price) if you can afford to do that because at the end of the day, if you intend on keeping the piano for awhile, your investment will go much further and the student or player can progress in their music making for years to come as opposed to growing out of the piano too soon. The Kawai ES100 is a piano even a pro can love if they are on a budget, want a limited but useful amount of features, and are focused on realistic acoustic piano sound and key action. But no matter what brand or model you may chose, it's all about the music and having an enjoyable playing experience and ultimately you can get that on many (but not all) brands and models. The Kawai ES100 isn't the only one to get in the low price range, but there's simply not much to complain about so it is definitely a winner for what it offers:).

If you want more info on new digital pianos and LOWER PRICES than internet discounts, please email me at tim@azpianowholesale.com or call direct at 602-571-1864.