'The Stage 2 blows its predecessors away. It is not cheap but, with its excellent new pianos, superb organs, improved synthesizer and its ability to load and play your own samples as well as Nord's existing library, you have to take it very seriously'.


Nord's flagship product, the Nord Stage 2 HA88, is reviewed in the new issue of Sound On Sound magazine where it is praised extremely highly throughout.

'The Grand Imperial is my favorite piano, so it was with some trepidation that I started to play...Was I disappointed? Not a bit! The sampling is even, the velocity transistors are smooth, the string resonance is lifelike, and the new Long Release function adds even more 'size' to the sound. I love it'.

'I particularly like the Rhodes MK II 'Shallow Close' version. With tremolo and a touch of drive, played through a slow Leslie, the results are magic'.

'As is now the norm for Hammond emulations, this line is excellent and, with the new 'Vintage 2' mode selected to provide lots of lovely generator leakage and the improved rotary speaker effect providing some growl, the results can be magic. The initial sound is now much more authentic , the key-click and percussion effects are first class, and details such as the compression of the percussion footage and the wrap-around of the 1 drawbar are correctly implemented. All in all, it does its job superbly'.

'At some point during the course of this review, I used the Sound Manager software to delete the existing grand pianos and load the 'Extra Large' Bosendorfer and, in truth, I think that I could play this all day, not just because it sounds great, but because the HA88 keybed makes it a pleasure'.

'All in all, the Stage 2 is a huge step forward from the Stage EX. It's not cheap, but the combination of excellent acoustic pianos, superb e-pianos and Clavinets, unsurpassed organ emulations, sample replay and a suprisingly flexible polysynth should be a powerful aphrodisiac for players whose response to modern workstations is something along the lines of '$*%$?!?!?''.

'...the Nord Stage 2 is a very fine instrument'.

The full review can be found in the November Issue (Vol 27, Issue 1) of Sound On Sound magazine. The Nord Stage 2 HA88 is available now at £3399 RRP inc VAT.

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