Q: What keyboard amp would you recommend? What do you particularly like about it?

A: Assuming your keyboard is a modern one with sampled sounds, don’t buy a keyboard amp at all. Just buy a small PA.

If you are playing a vintage instrument, the purpose of the amp is to CHANGE the sound. Usually you are trying to “warm it up” with tube overtones, such as with a Rhodes or Wurlitzer piano played through a Fender Bassman Ten or other vintage tube amp, or to create a chorus and vibrato effect such as playing a Hammond organ through a Leslie 122/147. With a modern instrument, all that is already built in with the samples and effects in the keyboard, so the only purpose of an amp is to make it louder. That’s precisely what a PA system is designed to do. They are designed specifically to NOT CHANGE the sound. For this reason, modern keyboards seldom sound as good played through a “keyboard amp” as they do through a small, high quality PA system.

My favorite keyboard amp is the Bose LS1. Keyboards sound stunning through it, but it’s pricey. On a budget, just go to Sam’s Club and buy an ION Total PA Max, or one of their smaller units. You’ll spend less and sound better than buying a "keyboard amp."

Q: How do you deaden the sound of a baby grand piano besides closing the lid and holding the soft pedal down? It's bothering the neighbors.

A: Buy a Yamaha P-515 and a pair of Sennheiser HD280Pro headphones. Plug the headphones into the P-515, close your eyes, and you’ll swear you’re playing a 9 foot concert grand… which sounds WAY better than your baby grand… and the neighbors will never hear a thing!

Response to Irv's answer from Howard Miller:  I agree. My wife is a professional musician. Years ago, we had a couple of upright pianos, but as I got older, I came to hate having to move the things. We got rid of them and we got a decent digital piano. She complained about it, but it worked well enough that she could practice. It has two foot pedals instead of three, but as I understand it, the third pedal is pretty unused. It can reproduce what sounds like a decent grand sound, an upright, harpsichord, and organ. No organ pedals, but she mostly uses the upright mode. I don't doubt her complaints, but I can move the thing all by myself.

Irv's response to Howard Miller: Yamaha has made AMAZING progress in digital pianos in the last few years. If you were to buy your wife a P-515, I doubt you’d hear her complain again. The action is nearly indistinguishable from a Yamaha 9 foot concert grand, complete with “escapement” and “graded hammer action.” The tone is so good through headphones that you can get lost in the music... and it’s surprisingly decent through the built in speakers (considerably better than in the past). If you get the optional stand made for the P-515, you can get a three pedal option that works and sounds exactly like the three pedals on a concert grand (which work quite differently from the pedals on your old upright pianos), including that the damper pedal is not an on/off switch but rather is a continuous pedal that can partially dampen when partially pressed. The keys don’t feel like plastic, they feel like wood and ivory. It even has the sound of sympathetic string resonance and mechanical damper sounds. I’m not kidding, if you bought your “decent” piano more than five years ago, the P-515 is at least five times as good as the one you bought. The P-515 is not a pretty piece of furniture like a Clavinova, but at $1,500 it is an affordable price, it sounds just as good, and it’s less than 50lbs. If you have money to burn, the bottom end CLP  700-series Clavinovas sound just like the P-515 but with a nice piano-looking wood cabinet (and still only need two people to move).  They sell for $2,000 to $2,700.  And the top-end CLP Clavinovas sound even better than the P-515, and sell for $3,500-7,500.  The most expensive ones even look like a small grand piano.

Q: Are digital pianos as good as real pianos?

A: That depends on your definition of “good.” If “good” to you means it sounds like a 9′ concert grand, and you can play it without bothering neighbors, and you can move it easily when you move to a different house, and it never needs to be tuned, and it’s less than 1/10 the price of an acoustic piano of decent quality, then the answer is yes (if you buy a Yamaha P-515 or above). If “good” to you means a beautiful piece of furniture, that is real and unique and handmade, that produces its sound by a piece of wood vibrating in response to string vibrations, that is organic and mechanical and clunky and wonderful, and has the intrinsic musicality unique to real pianos, then the answer is no.

I have one of each, they are both wonderful instruments, and I love them both. When I want to emote and have a sensory experience, I go to my baby grand. When I want to grin from ear to ear, I go to my digital.

Q: Do digital pianos hold their value?

A: No. They drop in value as fast as computers do. That's because they are computers.  They lose value is because they become obsolete quickly, as newer ones come out in just a few years that are so much better.  And also because they tend to not "hold up" as well as acoustic pianos over time.  Just like computers, the electronics and the mechanical controllers (keys) eventually start to die.

Plan on a digital piano being worth half of what you paid for it a couple of years after you buy it. And plan on replacing it every ten years or so.  Treat it in your mind more like a car that you will need to replace after 100,000 or 200,000 miles.  The good thing is, digitals are so much cheaper than acoustics that you can replace them many times before spending as much as you would on an acoustic piano.  You will never have to pay to have them tuned, and you will never have to pay to have them moved.