Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I recently purchased this unit from Musician's Friend for around $300.00. It arrived quickly and I immediately set it up and took it for a spin.
The pros: The keyboard itself is one of the most realistic I've seen in a digital piano. The keys are weighted, not "graded", and there is a very big difference. I haven't been playing piano for awhile, (synth fan) and it took a bit of getting used to. Today, I had the opportunity to play a Yamaha Grand piano and I can say that the feel of the Williams was somewhat comparable. Amazing! The sounds are quite realistic as they should be as these are digitally sampled. The little built in speakers are not worth the material they're made of, but I fed the output to two fender amps and it made a world of difference.
The cons: While the controls are fairly straight forward, there are sub menus after sub menus and as the display is made of a simple 3 digit red LED, it is sometimes hard to figure out what it's trying to tell you. Additionally, the manual is one of the worst. In many cases, it leaves out an important step, (button push or combination button push), to get you where you need to be to activate a certain function. I have managed to figure out many functions, but by no means, all. I like to use the layer function with Piano and strings. Each layer can be independently controlled for such parameters as volume, touch, etc. The problem is that in this mode, polyphony seems to be at a premium. With heavy sustain, the strings will cut out at an annoying rate. (Whichever voice is NOT set as primary gets cut, and it also cuts the notes in sequence from oldest to most recent, which, I suppose, is the best way to do it, but with today's tech, there's really no reason this should occur at all. 128 note polyphony is not hard to achieve). In single voice mode, there seems to be no problem no matter how many notes are playing or using heavy sustain.
Conclusion: For the price, this instrument blows any other digital piano I've seen, and I've seen many, right out of the water. Casio and Yamaha charge $1000.00 or more for an entry level unit. They don't really sound any better than this one does, especially with external amplification. If you want a decent instrument to learn on, or want to save space, you can't go wrong with this for the price. Despite a few operational quirks, I am very pleased.
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The Allegro 88-Key Digital Piano from Williams features 88 touch-sensitive, hammer-action, velocity-sensitive keys which provide you with the realistic touch and feel of a full-scale piano in an affordable, portable solution. At a price that is perfect for beginners looking to hone their piano skills, the Allegro is also a great fit for pros with its 64-note polyphony and 8 different piano/keyboard sounds. With the Allegro you also get Layer and Split modes, Reverb and Chorus effects, a Metronome feature, and 2-track recording with song recording and playback. It has a headphone jack so you can work out compositions without disturbing those around you, MIDI In/Out connections so you can use it as a basic controller with your favorite DAW, and stereo/mono line outputs to hook up to a monitors during recording or speakers or a live set.
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