I think about buy an A88 too. Please, send us your first impress about A88 keybed, touch feel, quiet .. Satisfied or not.
OK - A-88 came finally (6:00PM!) and I have it setup and playing. First, a shoutout to Sweetwater on packing. It was double boxed, Fedex Ground didn't mangle the box and the interior Roland box and packing was flawless - always a concern when shipping something 1000+ miles that weighs 50-60 lbs in the box.
Also need to figure out what the deal is with my M-Audio damper pedal I was using - doesn't work with the A-88 although the included Roland DP-10 worked fine the minute I plugged it in the same pedal jack. I also am not sure what the point of the Roland USB driver is - it's not like this thing has USB audio or something. I guess a call to Roland and/or Sweetwater might be in order tomorrow to get to the bottom of that.
Physically, I think the keyboard is plain but pretty classy looking. The quality is typical of what I remember of higher-end Roland stuff from 20-30 years ago. All of the keys are the same height and the gaps between keys are very, very close to perfect (a few spacing irregularities but we are talking ultra picky here). The Ivory Feel surface texture is quite nice on both the white and black keys - actually the white keys surface feel is nicer than our Kawai studio upright acoustic.
Granted the unit is brand new, but the keybed is mechanically pretty quiet. The white keys have a very muted thud and a faint higher pitched component - the black keys seem even quieter. Frankly, our acoustic Kawai makes more mechanical noise than this thing. It doesn't strike me as much louder than the RD-2000 I played (also new out of the box).
The keybed feel is very nice. Travel is between the RD-800 I played (quite long) and the RD-2000 and Yamaha Montage (shorter than I expected). I would say the key travel is slightly less than out Kawai acoustic. Not mushy at the bottom, but not jarring. I think the keyboard has excellent repetition (it clearly behaves like a triple sensor keyboard IMHO). The rebound action is just a hair on the slow side but feels more "normal" to me than the RD-800 I played. Overall I would say the action is a touch on the heavy side (think Baldwin, not Yamaha) although I have no problem playing fast on it. Bear in mind I am a very average pianist, so that may not be saying much.
It feels a lot more like our Kawai acoustic than I expected. The biggest difference seems to be the escapement response. The real piano has a little more "over center" obvious escapement than the A-88.
The RD-2000 is clearly a "faster" feeling keyboard, although I was not convinced it felt all that much like a real piano when I played it. I'm sure ED will argue that (and he may be right - it has been a very long time since I played on a good full grand). The RD-800 felt really weird to me and I clearly prefer the A-88 (heresy!). The Montage was like a slightly harder playing RD-2000 as I recall.
Overall, I'm really pleased with this and I can see why Eric @ Spectrasonics is so enamored of these keyboards. I'm sure he could afford to use whatever he wanted to as controllers, but this doesn't feel
worse than the high end Roland stage pianos, just a little
different.
The joystick sucks for CC1 and the price is a bit steep for how basic it is, but the size/form factor is nice (low profile and narrow depth) and the keybed is excellent. I just need to settle on a velocity curve (I'm using 1 - LIGHT at the moment. Default is 2).
Cheers, Max
