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#Kawai #Aures #Hybrid

Welcome to another piano review here with us at the Merriam Pianos YouTube channel. In this video we’ll be looking at the Kawai K-300 Aures Hybrid Upright Piano. A hybrid piano is essentially a piano that combines both digital and acoustic elements.

This term hybrid gets thrown around all the time by manufacturer’s, even in cases where you have a fully digital piano with a single basic acoustic element. This isn’t the case here; the K300 Aures is a true hybrid instrument, meaning it’s both a fully functioning acoustic and digital instrument.

At its core, the K300 Aures is a K300 upright piano, but blended into this traditional acoustic instrument is the ‘brain’ of Kawai’s CA99 digital piano, with four transducers directly connected to the soundboard, and a 256 note tone engine with lots of different sounds.

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The Action:

Just like the traditional K300, the Aures version is also outfitted with Kawai’s highly regarded Millennium III Action. This action features all kinds of modern innovations, including the use of carbon fibre instead of wood in many of the assembly components, extended length key sticks for added control and evenness of key surface, satin finishes on the black keys and double felted mahogany core hammers (a premium material which minimizes distortion.)

The Aures modification to the action involves the addition of a silencing bar that when activated, blocks the hammers from striking the strings when the silent mode feature is engaged for playing with headphones or with only the internal sound engine engaged. The presence of this silencing bar necessitates an increased level of action regulation to ensure that the action still feels authentic when the silent mode is engaged.

This type of technology has been available for several years as an aftermarket retrofit, but in most cases even with increased regulation, the action would feel very different when playing acoustically vs playing with the silent mode engaged, with an overall sense of sloppiness and lack of control.


Piano Sound/Tone Engine:

There’s definitely a lot of things to point out from a design perspective to explain what makes the acoustic portion of the K300 Aures sound the way it does. A couple of highlights; the bass strings are longer than average which improves clarity and power. The soundboard is solid Sitka Spruce that also happens to be tapered, a process that is generally reserved for soundboards on instruments that are much more expensive. Tapering improves responsiveness as well as the overall dynamic range of the instrument.

In general, Kawai’s are observed to have a darker, warmer tone, especially as compared to the ubiquitous Yamaha U1, an instrument the K300 is often compared to. This definitely holds true here; the K300 definitely has a dark, rich and complex tonal profile.

In terms of the sound when it comes to the digital components of the instrument, this is where things get really interesting - there are no speakers to be found in this instrument! For instance, when you engage the digital sound engine and select a sound such as a string section, when you hear the sound of strings coming from the piano, that sound is not coming to your ear via speakers, but rather directly from the soundboard itself! This is done via transducers. The K300 Aures is equipped with 4 Onkyo transducers of various sizes, which essentially turns the soundboard into a giant speaker.

The bass response you get out of using a transducing the surface the size of a soundboard is totally unique. Even when layering the acoustic piano sound with the digital sound being transduced, there’s a remarkable level of clarity and virtually no distortion.


Conclusions:

The K300 Aures is without a doubt one of the coolest and most innovative pianos I’ve seen hit the market in my entire time in the industry. They’ve been hugely popular in our showroom and frequently on backorder, and this seems to be the case worldwide as Kawai can’t seem to make them fast enough. All in all, the K300 Aures is a truly engaging and highly musical experience through and through.

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