Customer Reviews

Casio WK-1630 76-Note Touch-Sensitive Portable Electronic Keyboard

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

My wife and I debated on which 76-Note keyboard to buy: Casio WK-1630 or Yamaha PSR-GX76AD. The price range for both products is very close.

At the beginning, we kind of lean on the Yamaha for the following reasons:
-Yamaha GX76 has 5 songs, 6 tracks memory while Casio WK1630 only has 2 songs, 6 tracks memory.
-Yamaha has one hundred built-in songs while Casio has twenty something songs.
-Yamaha has education book come with it while Casio has none.
-Yamaha has four local stores in town for services while Casio has none.

After testing both products in several stores, we finally settled for the Casio WK1630 for the following reasons: Casio WK1630 has a better volume control and the sound quality seems to be a little better than the Yamaha GX76. Since my wife is not a beginner, she doesn't care about the education book. She only cares the quality of the music and the audible level of the music. She wants loud PoP music. Yamaha can't produce loud enough music even we turned the volume to the max. We tried the volume features on several stores to make the comparison. The conclusion is Casio produces music louder at the max volume with acceptable sound quality while Yahama couldn't produce loud music at the max volume. That help us made up our mind.

So if you are a beginner and don't care about the loudness of the music, Yamaha seems to be better.
If you are not a beginner and want a loud PoP music, you may consider the Casio WK1630.

I have owned this keyboard for about six months, and although I'm extremely happy with it, there are a few drawbacks that anyone who is considering this keyboard should know about. So I'll try to make good as list as possible.

THE GOOD:

*realistic sounds (#19 is better than a real drawbar organ!)

*good DSP settings

*32 polyphony

*Alot of presets, so you can save your favorite sounds

*Powerful mixing board

*Layer and Split settings, which means that up to four sounds can be playing at once

*Very light weight, especially compaired to some Yamaha's and Rolands I've tried to pick up.

*Many tones, some very funny, such as Helicopter, Applause, and GunShot.

*Many different beats.

*The LCD screen is nice.

*Casio Cord is very accurate.

THE OKAY:

*The onboard speakers are loud, but the louder they get, the worse the quality. Its only a problem for me on a couple of the sounds.

*Only two songs can be saved at a time.

*The volume is very sensitive.

*Keys aren't weighted. I don't mind it, but some do.

*Touch sensitivity is okay. At it's highest, it's just okay, nothing like a real piano at all. But since the keys aren't weighted, you're not going to get much better.

THE BAD:

*Really big. Really really big.

*Feels flimsy. I've made scratches on mine by hitting my ring against it.

*Some of the sounds are the same, such as the violins

I bought my keyboard used without a manual. I've figured out most of the settings, such as how to mix, but there are still some which I haven't figured out yet. I would suggest getting the manual, even though it is very easy to understand and use. Like I said, it came used, and I've put it through alot (like a rainstorm, being dropped on the ground, ALOT of travel without a case in the car), and it's still holding up great. The speaker quality isn't an issue with me because if I want it loud, I can plug it into my amp. It does get very loud with it's own speakers (altough a few of the settings cause the sound to waver).

I absolutely love my keyboard. I've compaired it to others, such as the high end of the Yamaha DGX series, and I like my Casio much better.

Buy it!

This keyboard is phenomenal for the money!
I recently bought a Yamaha DGX-202, (a comparable unit), returned it then bought the Casio.
Casio blows the doors off the Yamaha.
The sound is phenomenal. (Much better than the Yamaha's)
The fuctionality is excellent.
The styling is beautiful.
And for the street price ($...) it's an incredible deal.
Get one immediately!

This is a surprisingly [inexpensive] piece of equipment for the kind of power it contains. With 232 tones, (32 which you can create yourself) some excellent demo songs to showcase it's power, and over 100 rythms (20 which you can create yourself) this is a powerful piano impersonator. I've things like this that were basically ... batteries. Expensive, bulky, meek, weak etc., you get the idea. This masterful musician's amigo is only 200 something dollars and is EXTREMELY poweful. To get the best out of this equipment, get the computer Music starter pack (or some kinda name like that) from cakewalk to create bigger, easier to compose songs. I'm only 14 and I can make I own music easily with this dynamic digitizer. You won't regret it.

My wife and I debated on which 76-Note keyboard to buy: Casio WK-1630 or Yamaha PSR-GX76AD. The price range for both products is very close.

At the beginning, we kind of leaning on the Yamaha for the following reasons:
-Yamaha GX76 has 5 songs, 6 tracks memory while Casio WK1630 only has 2 songs, 6 tracks memory.
-Yamaha has one hundred built-in songs while Casio has twenty something songs.
-Yamaha has a tutorial book come with it while Casio has none.
-Yamaha has four local stores in town for services while Casio has none.
-Yamaha has good reputation in producing musical instrument than Casio.

After testing both products in several stores, we finally settled for the Casio WK1630 for the following reasons: Casio WK-1630 has a better volume control and the sound quality seems to be a little better than the Yamaha GX76. Since my wife is not a beginner, she doesn't care about the education book. She only cares the quality of the music and the audible level of the music. She wants loud PoP music. Yamaha can't produce loud enough music even we turned the volume to the max. We tried the volume features on several stores to make the comparison. The conclusion is Casio produces music louder at the max volume with acceptable sound quality while Yahama couldn't produce loud music at the max volume. That help us made up our mind.

So if you are a beginner and don't care about the loudness of the music, Yamaha seems to be better: more feature and a free tutorial book.
If you are not a beginner and want a loud PoP music, you may consider the Casio WK-1630.

i am a 16 piano lover, and i am lucky enough to own a beautiful piano. yet, that piano happens to be in the center of the house, much to my family's dislike. As i said, i love piano, and tend to practice a lot. This keyboard was perfect for those times when my dad had a headache, or my mom was trying to watch tv, of my sister was sleeping. The sound is beautiful, it's easy to use, and the headphones i bought in addition are wonderful. this keyboard has many additional aspects to it, although i haven't quiet figured them out...lol. the ones i use are the recording, where you can even store songs you've recorded (great for finding your trouble spots and wrong notes in pieces), and i also use the metronome. Also, it's a lot of fun to play around with the different sounds you can use, there's some really great ones. The display is very clear and displays the intrument largely.
BUY THIS!!!

This synth is an underrated gem. I am a synthesizer enthusiast and love classic synths and I'm telling you right now that this one will be sought after in the future once people really figure out how good it actually is. The on-board mixer is fantastic, preset sounds are decent, but it's real power is the synthesizer and sequencer functions.

The synthesizer function allows you to create some very good tones using a type of wavetable synthesis. There are two oscillators of lots of sampled tones, plus a saw wave and square wave to play with. The saw wave is VERY fat. It also has some of the same envelope features that the famous Casio CZ series had to tweak pitch and amplitude. There's not as many stages as the CZs, but you can get some similar tones. There's also a filter that is pretty interesting that works with touch sensitivity.

It has 76 switchable touch sensitive keys, a pitch and mod wheel, plus full midi function including bulk dump and receive to save all your patches and sequences to a computer. It's also multi timbrel so you can compose using external midi hardware or software.

The pattern sequencer is really cool. You can create your own beats and melodies then use the casio chord function to play your sequence in whatever key/chord you like. I can't think of many other even professional sequencers that do this. You can store up to 10 separate patterns which each include 4 parts and 2 fills, which isn't that bad.

The song sequencer is cool but the only real drawback is the limited song storage, but this can be easily corrected using a laptop to save and load midi dumps, making storage unlimited.

Then to top it off it makes a killer midi controller. You get a ton of bang for your buck on this synth.