Silent practice, honestly described

A digital piano solves the problem most UK players actually have: neighbours. Volume control and a headphone socket mean you can work on a passage at eleven at night without a single complaint, and repeat four bars forty times without anyone else in the house knowing. In a flat, a terraced house or a shared rental, that flexibility is worth more than any amount of tonal prestige.

One caveat. A digital piano is silent to the strings, not to the room. Under the keys sits a weighted hammer mechanism, and every note sends a soft thud down through the instrument and into the floor — audible through floorboards to the flat below. Put it on a ground floor if you can, on a thick rug or dense foam mat, and away from a shared wall. Closed-back headphones, which seal around the ear, also stop the click of the keys escaping into the room. Key noise is a fraction of a piano's volume, and most neighbours will never notice it.

The action is the instrument

Everything else is a bonus. If the keyboard doesn't feel like a piano, you'll build habits you have to unlearn later, and you won't enjoy practising.

• Eighty-eight fully weighted keys. Not "semi-weighted", not "touch-sensitive". Those are spring-loaded synth actions and feel nothing like a piano.
• Hammer action. Look for "hammer action" or "graded hammer action" in the specification: a real weighted mechanism, not a spring.
• Graded touch. Bass keys slightly heavier than the treble, as on an acoustic.
• Triple sensor. Three contact points per key instead of two, giving cleaner repetition and better control at low dynamics.
• Escapement. A slight notch as the key reaches the bottom of its travel — it lets you play softly and quickly at once.

When you try one, play slowly and quietly. Anyone can make a digital sound decent when thumped; the real test is whether you can shape a pianissimo phrase without the tone dropping out or the touch feeling vague.

Pedals deserve more attention than they get

The sustain pedal is not an accessory; it's part of how the instrument speaks. Many budget bundles include a small square switch pedal on a thin cable that simply means "sustain on" or "sustain off" — a poor substitute for the real thing.

What you want is a continuous or progressive damper pedal, which reports how far you've pressed it and allows half-pedalling: the partial damping behind blurred, layered harmonies in Romantic repertoire and the warm wash under jazz ballads. Without it you lose an entire expressive dimension.

Check the physical arrangement too. A pedal unit bolted to the stand, with a metal pedal that doesn't skitter across the floor, beats a loose plastic block on a trailing lead. Three-pedal units exist, and a middle sostenuto is lovely if your repertoire calls for it — but one superb sustain pedal beats three mediocre ones.

Sound, speakers and what happens at low volume

Two specifications matter above the rest. Polyphony is how many notes can sound at once; with the pedal down, a rich chord plus resonance easily consumes sixty or more, so treat 128 notes as a minimum and 192 as comfortable. Resonance modelling — the sympathetic ring of the whole instrument when the dampers lift — is what stops sustained chords sounding thin and synthetic.

Speaker power is only a rough guide. Two eight-watt speakers can be perfectly pleasant in a small bedroom; if you want a fortissimo you can feel in your chest, look for twenty watts per channel or more. More useful is how the instrument behaves quietly. Turn the volume down and listen: does the tone stay full and rounded, or thin out into a tinny whisper? Some models sound lovely loud and brittle soft, which is exactly backwards for practice.

Check the headphone socket as well. A full-size 6.35mm jack is more robust than 3.5mm, and closed-back headphones flatter the instrument far more than pocket earbuds. A front-edge socket is convenient; one on the rear underside means fiddling about in the dark.

Features worth paying for, and the ones to ignore

Spend your money on the keyboard and the piano sound; everything else is secondary.

• Worth having: a good second piano voice, a metronome that handles odd metres and subdivisions, a simple recorder so you can hear yourself back, Bluetooth MIDI for notation and learning apps, split and layer for teaching, transpose, and a line output for later.
• Safe to ignore: three hundred novelty voices, drum kits, auto-accompaniment, flashing lights and menus full of options. They add cost and rarely get used. Five excellent sounds will serve you for a decade.

Buying well and setting it up at home

Play before you buy if you possibly can. Take the piece you're working on to a showroom with a decent range and spend twenty minutes on each candidate; your hands will tell you more than any review. Ordering online is fine — distance purchases in the UK normally carry a fourteen-day right to cancel — but check the retailer's terms on return carriage, which can be substantial for a heavy cabinet model.

Second-hand instruments are excellent value and most have led gentle lives. Test every key from bottom to top for clicks, sticking or uneven volume, hold a chord with the pedal down and listen for buzzing speakers, and take your own headphones so you can judge the sound without shop noise.

Budget for the whole setup. Roughly £400–£600 buys a credible 88-key weighted instrument; £700–£1,200 brings a noticeably better action, richer sound and a proper pedal unit; beyond that you're paying for cabinet furniture, better amplification and sometimes a longer warranty. Add a bench at the right height — around forty-eight to fifty centimetres from the floor — a dense mat or rug to soak up the key thud, and decent headphones. Set the keyboard so your forearms sit level and your shoulders will thank you for years.