Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Es920 vs MP7es (sound)

That is just marketing content. The sound system of the ES920 is not high end. You can buy some powered monitors for $250-300/pair that will have superior audio performance.

The MP7SE does not have audible distortion. It does not even include an amplifier and speaker system. You can hook it up to an ampllifier and speakers of whatever quality you like. If I owned an ES920 I would not even use the builtin speakers.

The only thing that would cause me to prefer the sound of pianos in the ES920 is if the samples are larger with longer sustain before looping kicked in. The builtin speakers of the ES920 would only be an added bonus that I would not use very often.

I completely disagree. I’ve got some decent 5-inch Tannoy studio monitors, and the ES920 internal speakers sound better. They’re good enough that I use them with no additional PA at a lot of acoustic gigs, even in pretty big concert halls. And when I’m playing a gig with a PA the internal speakers are better than floor wedge monitors. Any “looping” artifacts are not noticeable when playing actual music. The ES920 is a great instrument as is, with its internal voices and speakers. Adding extra cables, computers, VSTs, and external speakers is a lot of hassle for nearly zero musical benefit. Spend your time playing music, not diddling with hardware.

Tannoy is not a good monitor speaker. My Behringer truth crushes CLP-735 in terms of sound quality and loudness.

At face value, it can be argued you’ve answered your main question - ES920 or MP7?

One of the reasons why a given person’s YMMV so often varies is that there is usually more than what meets the eyes …. and ears …. and fingers …. and etc than what is perceived during initial impressions.

I think many of us could agree that since the ES920 is a newer design, it might sound somewhat different …. maybe better than a SE model MP7, but i would not expect there to be a noticeably big difference between the two. On the other hand, it seems as though you/your ears did detect a big difference. Since we all have different ears, maybe this is enough to explain the differences you heard between these two …. but maybe not, maybe there are other reasons, such as, how, exactly, did Kawai make the recordings you compared?

This ties in with your hope to find side-by-side comparison. At face value, I think it is impractical and possibly impossible to provide a realistic, apples-to-apples, side-by-side comparison of these 2 DPs. Logically, the most likely mode to compare would be what they both sound like through headphones or perhaps through the same pair of studio monitors. ES920 has headphone-specific sound features, MP7 does not BUT it has a lot if sound-effects features/controllers etc to further make a side-by-side comparison flawed by default.

This gets to another aspect you noticed …. MP7 sounds “distorted” …. as though a tape recording …. but ES920 sounded like “CD “ quality…? Again, i would not expect to hear this big of a difference, but you did, either because maybe this is how your ears work, or maybe this was influenced by the the way in which the AV “youtubes” were produced to work …. ? Either way, since some people like distorted sound, the effects and controllers in the MP7 allow you to make wide adjustments from dry to dripping wet sound effects …. and the MP7 effectively has several amps built-in, to include Suitcase, MStack, JCombo and FBass 🙂