Pianists will always hanker for the experience of playing an acoustic piano, preferably a grand. Yet, to pianists living in apartment complexes with strict noise level regulations, it isn't always a matter of the kind of piano they can afford. It happens to be a matter of what they are allowed to play on, given the fact that piano sounds are known to leak through walls and floors. As well known as it is that digital pianos can never actually replace acoustic pianos in timbre or playing experience, the latest models, the higher-end Roland digital pianos especially, certainly have closed the gap significantly.
Even if Roland digital pianos or any other will never actually be a substitute for acoustic pianos, they can wonderfully complement them. A practicing pianist can certainly get completely useful work done on digital pianos. One of the best advances in digital piano technology to have helped this to come about, has been the modern keyboard action. Pianos like the Yamaha AvantGrand and the top-of-the-line Roland pianos have all kinds of new technology built into their keyboard actions to help them be indistinguishable from the real thing. Roland digital pianos for instance have had a progressive hammer action keyboard for about a decade now. In this technology, the keyboard is designed to be stiffer to play the lower you go down the scale, and lighter to play the higher you go.
This isn't the only thing that makes for a believable piano action. A real piano keyboard features a mechanism known as escapement or letoff. On a real piano, the piano keys aren't connected to the hammers inside in any rigid way. If you keep the pressure on on a key, it doesn't keep pressing the hammer against the string. Pressing down a key only throws the hammer once at the strings. Keep pressing on the key, and it doesn't do anything further. This is rather important. If it weren't for this, the hammer would keep pressing on the strings and completely silence them. Of course, on a digital piano there is no hammer and there are no strings. What the keyboard needs to simulate though is the feeling of a key that actually uses this kind of a lever system. On an acoustic piano, the escapement mechanism feels like a certain amount of sudden resistance about halfway down through a keypress. The piano key isn't smooth to depress all the way through. Roland digital pianos feature escapement.
These days, even Roland pianos in the affordable part of the range feature keyboards with ivory feel, escapement, and a progressive keyboard action. Models like the Roland FP-7F for instance, are full-featured models that come startlingly close to what a real acoustic piano feels like to play. As such, if you are a classical pianist in training, Roland digital pianos certainly deserve a closer look from you.
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