What's the latest gear you've acquired?

FWIW on me... Eric Heiserman said he'd definitely prefer the K47. Guess I'm returning my Ricky Nelson "Greatest Hits" now.
Unless... It's too late.

I still have a soft spot for the M7 though. It even sounds like a later Secret Service Boss for James Bond.


All those mint boxes of VF-14's I found last April 1st, were all made by NOS too.
I got them at a local University's garage and bake sale.
On top of all the Studers and Neumann's they were going to throw out.

Those VF-14's were manufactured with high degrees. To finally become graduated cylinders.
Chris

I used to use it on my top end bus but now it’s gonna be another drum bus I imagine along with the 609, the Overstayers, the HG2, the LTLO etc. you can never have too many drum busses. Ha Ha.

Bongos. Because the world needs more bongos in their music

And with a left mount?
Chris

I recently bought a new Steinway Model D piano sample library from EastWest. I already have their Bosendorfer 290 library and love it so I thought I'd get the Steinway too. Sometimes the Bosendorfer needs a little more Zing to cut through a dense mix so Steinway to the rescue. I needed to add to my second Terrabyte of sample libraries. Pianos are important.

At least they didn't butcher Baker.
Chris

I think you're giving longscale a pretty bleak picture, maybe more than you intended, so I'll give my FWIW:

The KX88 is not good, compared with what's available today, but as you say you find it useable. Obviously, since you said to find one you can live with and get used to it. Clearly, it's all a matter of degrees and what you're after, but you can get far closer, which means far less "getting used to it"—and a more nuanced performance (subtle control of velocity, etc.).

I have a Yamaha P-515. I got used to it in...say the first hour. Is it the best "piano" (compared to acoustic) I've ever played? No. Is it better than many crappy pianos I've played? Easily. It's a little on the heavy side as opposed to light, but it's surprisingly fast (it seems to be loaded a little on the initial break of the key). IIRC, Nord Stage uses the same keyboard minus the escapement feature.

For me, the number one feature—as far as accepting/tolerating the action—is key length. I like Casio, but (bless them), they've been on the kick of making pianos with the smallest possible depth. To me, they have become unplayable, even their very expensive compact piano that gets raves. Back to the point: Play a black key, if the back of the key doesn't drop appreciably in level, there will be problems playing challenging music. For a real piano, the black keys will nearly drop evenly across the length—because the keys are deep and therefore the angle remains shallow. For my P-515, the rear of the key drops about half the amount of the front. No ideal, but useable. A keyboard with short keys will scarcely drop at the back, because the pivot is so close. That means if you're playing a voicing that chokes you to the back to the key (white also), you'll have to play it hard to ensure it plays at all, and have very little control over tone.

And that's about the best you can so for a stage-type portable piano—find one with good touch and features, and make sure the keys aren't too short. I haven't played the top-end Kawaii, I believe it's better still, but bigger, heavier, and quite a bit more expensive. Fortunately, even 50% of the way there is a hundred times better than 10%, and the Yamaha is far more of a "piano" experience than my older Casio (which didn't have quite as short of keys as the new ones do). The Casio seemed reasonable as a controller for a piano sample library, but the better keyboard of the P-515 gives a much more piano-like, expressive performance, a big step up.

Of course, the consoles with full piano action are better still. But I think 

Well here’s finally a couple of unexciting pictures of the preamp. I honestly wouldn’t even call it a prototype; more like a development box that’s been changed and added to over the many years. In fact, it was originally thought for vertical orientation for an 8-channel modular-rack with a very-beefy external power supply. That was a good 10-15 years ago. The new latest thought is a 2U single-channel with power supply built-in.

After this latest test, I’m truly fully into the 414 XLII in omni. On the SSL Duality is sounded really good on OH. Through John’s preamp, we both were floored… With how massive it sounded. I would have thought a compressor was on it! This was with Input Z at 30k. The 414 was probably dropping the phantom voltage to around 40V, but switching it to David Josephson’s proposed P48H, seemed to lock into 48V, but the 414 didn’t seem to care either way. It also could care less of the constant-current 10ma phantom-mode.

In all the tests we’ve done over the past 15-years, some mics could care less with 10ma constant-current; other mics, it’s made a big difference. We still need to try it on a 103 again… That was definitely like putting the mic on steroids, but the unwanted side-effect was loud HF background hiss. Once we’re done with this preamp, we’ll explore that more.

We’ve yet to blow up a mic, but we haven’t tried an Earthworks yet… They told us years ago it would though!

drive.google.com/file/d/1eyenq3Sac3u6ciTWm5vKy_BOijs8IIuc/view?usp=drivesdk

drive.google.com/file/d/1qecRVuWdXKD-MBTnnrv3OY3cT-q0El8c/view?usp=drivesdk

They are EHC (Electronic Hardware Corporation) 3000 Series knobs.
www.ehcknobs.com/index.php?id=3000

Don’t miss the Distributor Stock Check link on the bottom left of every page.

The quality is excellent!

I had a little bag of them from many years ago, when I selected them for a custom console that was going to be made for me, but never came to fruition. We liked the look of them for the vertical 8-ch. preamp idea, but now with much more space on the 2U single-ch. horizontal approach, we can use much bigger knobs.