▶▶▶ 88-KEY Portable Educational Keyboard

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

88-KEY Portable Educational Keyboard

88-KEY Portable Educational Keyboard Review

Great value, and a marked improvement over the old 500 and 505 models. The speakers produce a richer sound tone, and the display window is much clearer and easier to read. Additional features over the 505 include one-touch "auto-accompaniment", where you can try different background rhythms to your recorded notes (jazz, rock, salsa, etc) at a single touch of a button. There are a few more voices to choose from, and the "sweet" sounds are more realistic than on the old models. The unit looks better as a whole, being a sleek silver instead of a dull plastic beige. Also, the controls are a lot more "touch friendly", especially the selection "spin wheel" that lets you choose features much faster than the older models did.

Connectivity is much simpler than on the 500, requiring only a simple USB cord instead of a special MIDI cord.

The one downside of this keyboard is that a USB drive is the only portable media compatible with this unit, and unfortunately they place the plug-in port in the back, which make it somewhat difficult to reach over and plug the drive in while you're trying to play and select. Because of this, I take away a star, and hope that in their next model, Yamaha will put the USB port somewhere in FRONT where it's easy to reach and plug the drive.

I actually recommend this unit over the DGX 620 (Yamaha's highest available model at the time of this review). All features are exactly the same on the two models, except the keys in the 620 are weighted to as close to a real piano as you'll get. Yamaha calls them 'Graded Hammer Standard' keys.

The 520 does not have the GHS keys, but the trade-off (besides a considerably lower cost than the 620) is a lot of weight...the 620 unit as a whole weighs 19 lbs more than the 520 unit. So if you're a traveling musician like me and have to load and unload your keyboard all the time carrying your instrument to your gigs, you're actually much better off with the 520. Get the 620 only if you want a more realistic feel and don't want to move the keyboard a lot.

Overall, an excellent instrument...and if you have any of the older models, I highly recommend an upgrade!