Loog Piano: My review

I bought two of the original Loog guitars, little 3-string acoustic guitars intended for new learners and especially children. There’s a lot to like about them: they’re inexpensive, cute, and have surprisingly good sound and volume. The larger one gives a tenor guitar sort of sound that’s pleasant, and the smaller one is ukulele-ish. The kids are getting old enough to be into them, and I love having them around.

So when Loog announced a piano, I was excited. The design is cute and very “Loog”, and the small 3-octave keyboard seemed like a perfect fit for the small rooms in our condo. Simple on-off with one good sound seemed really nice to me. I was used to the 70 useless presets of the old Yamahas of my youth.

There was one problem with the original Loog guitar: they ran pretty late getting delivered. This isn’t uncommon on Kickstarter, of course. Especially for a first-time manufacturer, and especially with woodworking, there’s a lot to learn. Just ask the good folks at keyboard.io, who are some of the best at providing transparent updates about contract manufacturing. It was Loog’s first kickstarter project, so I wasn’t surprised.

All these years later, I figured Loog would have their ducks in a row. Boy was I wrong. The piano had numerous manufacturing and quality problems. The product features were repeatedly revised over the course of the campaign. My model didn’t even turn on when it first arrived, suggesting quite poor quality control. In the end, delivery was over 6 months past projections, and it was the sort of creeping “maybe next month!” lateness that any manager is familiar with in a poorly executed project.

First, some thoughts the piano itself:

Quality

The Loog claims on its box to be “a portable, digital piano for children and grown-ups, with pro sound and design.” Let’s investigate.

I’ll get the worst out of the way first: I was delivered a defective product that won’t turn on, and I have no idea when I’ll be able to get a working one. More on the service quality below, but I proceeded to check out other issues with the keyboard while hoping for a replacement.

Here’s the user guide. One thing I want you to notice is the pasted-on warning about what kind of charger to attach. The Loog doesn’t even come with the cheapest of wall warts that meet it’s requirements, and evidently the device is “engineered” in such a way that it can’t handle being connected to a fast charger setup. They evidently noticed this so late in the process that they needed to attach an after-thought of a warning to these cards rather than re-print something professional.

The loog has a 1/8" stereo connector for headphones, a USB-C port that serves double-duty for charging and for use as a MIDI controller. It has two more 1/8" connectors for the octave shifter and sustain pedal.

The fabric cover of the piano is nice enough. It’s a nylon mesh in the characteristic Loog red, though some Kickstarter backers complain that theirs came out pink. I wonder about how it would age with the hurting a kid may put on it.

The wood on the keyboard is quite nice. There’s clear coat maple for the sides and the octave shifter that’s beautiful, and the dark-stained volume knob is nice and chunky with really smooth rotation. It feels great.

Sound

// TODO if and when I get a working keyboard. However, there are quite a few comments on the Kickstarter page
// complaining that the sound quality is nowhere near the "pro" claimed on the packaging and marketing.

Keys

The plastic of the keys is pretty atrocious, though. It’s really slick and cheap feeling. Compared to an inexpensive Akai 25-key MIDI controller, it’s pretty disappointing. Let’s also be clear, it’s not “for kids and grownups”. Unless you have pretty small hands, it’s definitely “for kids”. Smaller adults who struggle to do stretches on a full-size keyboard may benefit from that, though. I found it almost unplayably cramped.

The action feels cheap. I can’t tell how good the key sensitivity is, and whether the volume response is smooth with varying force, but if I get a working one, I’ll update this.

Accessories

I got two significant accessories with the Loog: legs and an octave shifter to extend the three-octave range. The legs appear clever at first. They’re powder coated and come in to sections you can screw together. That means that you get 3 heights with two components. There are two big flaws. The longest version of the legs are still the size of a child-height desk, so I think by the time a kid is seven it’s already too short for them. Second, to install the legs you have to remove the black rubber pads on the bottom of the keyboard. This is an incredible design oversight - having to permanently alter the product to install some temporary legs. You’d be better off buying a keyboard stand from a music shop if you want to actually move the piano from place to place.

The octave shifter has a great feel - a nice click when you depress it makes it obvious what you’re doing. It’s got a really attractive design and was beautifully executed. Unfortunately there’s no indication on the keyboard what octave range it’s currently in. I think the octave shifter would make a really great control for a personal electronic project using an ESP32 or similar.

Production

So, there are quite a few disappointments from a product and quality perspective, and the production process itself did not inspire confidence, with late updates. Again, compare to someone like keyboard.io, who manage to be both timely and transparent with their updates. Even when the content of the updates is disappointing, the reasoning - and even the thought behind the reasoning - is clear and justifiable. They rarely make the same mistake twice.

Manufacturing delays and production startup issues are somewhat par for the course for new Kickstarter projects, but Loog has been producing wooden products in China for over five years. That they would still have this much trouble managing a manufacturing situation is concerning to me - they’re either still naive and incompetent or simply dishonest.

By the time Loog finally delivered a piano to me, they were already selling a production model co-branded with Duolingo, and the discount on the black friday piano brought it to nearly the same price as the one-year-long pre-order. So Loog got either interest or cheap capital for a year from my purchase and didn’t even actually give me a significant discount.

Support

When I first tried to contact Loog about the issues I encountered with the first piano I received, I got a promise to “follow up over email.” It took 12 days before I got a message from support, wherein they asked me to disassemble they keyboard and check the connections by hand. There’s a lithium ion battery inside, and they provided no documentation about what parts of the circuit board are “hot” or which connections that I should be checking, or the technique for checking them. They’re lucky I have an EE degree and an ohmmeter.

Disassembly required removing 12 (!) screws, and the top of the volume control, because the volume pot is soldered directly to the circuit board. I don’t think it’s a good sign for product longevity to have an external control that’s going to be manipulated a lot soldered directly to the board without much other support structure. The pot isn’t even secured to the top with a nut, so you can put a lot of force on the board just by pulling the pot side-to-side. I couldn’t find any obvious problems with the wiring, so I’m currently in a holding pattern with their support. I’ll update this post with new notes as that progresses.

Nevermind

What was originally intended as a present to learn and play with over the summer holidays has now slipped to post-Christmas and I have no idea if I actually will receive a working product. There are other similar complaints on the keyboard page. If I get this resolved, I’ll let you know how they addressed my concerns, but as of the date of publication I’m out $300 USD with no remedy in sight.

In the end, I bought my kids (and let’s be honest, myself) a Casio. The CT-S1 is a competently executed version of the Loog: simple buttons, with a minimalist style in an attractive cover. It can run off of a battery and has 15 sounds. It also functions as a basic MIDI controller like the Loog. 61 keys is more than I really wanted, but it’s still compact enough. It’s cheaper than the Loog, sounds great, and best of all, actually works. I managed to source brand new one for under $90 USD on Lazada, about 1/3 the price of a Loog.