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I have just joined the forum, having read many articles, and most on the MP11.
I purchased one in June this year, and the the piano is excellent in many ways, but there are problems with the sound, and I have trawled through all the menus, downloaded updates, and had engineer visits etc etc. The D Eb and E above middle C are just not musically the same as the notes around them, and no amount of fiddling with the technology on board the piano will cure the problem with these notes without changing everything else. Working with the Pop sounds has brought the best results so far for playability, but it takes a lot of fiddling.
The Galaxy Steinway Vintage D looks perhaps to be a good way to getting a better sound combined with the wonderful touch of the MP, and I would be interested to know if anyone has this sample and if it is as good as it sounds on the many demos on the net.

There has been serious discussion in this Forum of the sounds of certain keys on all the Kawai pianos that use the same Grand Feel keyboard and Harmonic Imaging XL engine. Particularly for their flagship Concert Grand sound.

Folks at Kawai will tell you it is the result of individually sampling each key which produces an "organic" sound.

Others, myself included, believe it to be a defect.

There is nothing anyone has tried to fine tune these keys that works. Nor has there been an effective solution put forward by Kawai. This defect does not affect every piano with this setup. Some folks have had product exchanged and remark of the difference. That may be a solution for you.

The Pop sounds are a good substitute and some have used Mellow Grand as well. Reverb can also affect the results. I usually turn it off.

Regarding software pianos, make sure you try before you buy. They typically might need a fairly good computer (think $$$) with more than one CPU, and possibly fast disk drives. PianoTeq has a really good demo that includes all their sounds. It is not based on Sound Samples.

Many thanks for your quick reply.
It is a problem to try software before you buy here in England.
You have to buy and hope it works.
I have tried net trial version of Galaxy Steinway, and it sounds even across the range, but you still need to play it to be sure.

regards mike

The nearest to trying before buying is this service

http://www.try-sound.com/

latency is horrible but you can play back the midi samples at normal speed, and play with the interface as if it were installed, and of course press the keys and use it with your keyboard, even if latency is what it is.

It is free anyway, so nothing lost for trying. I still found it very useful.

I also tried the vintage D and Ivory 2 on there before buying, both I really liked, but the latter a bit more for its fuller sound ,but then I am noob player so that is something you have to decide for yourself.

Of course pianoteq already has a great demo you can try, even if a few black keys are disabled and has a time limit of 20 mins.

I have tried the Galaxy on there. Sounded even across the whole keyboard. Sounds like the Ivory was better for you...I haven`t tried that. I want it for playing classical pieces..

The Mp11 will record ok for chord backgrounds and stuff like that, but it`s not really good enough for classical.

Playing anything was hard to assess I thought on try-sound, in the end it was to some degree a bit of a leap of faith for me which of the two to get. I just liked the sound/colour of the American D that little bit more. No doubt you will get camps to vouch for both and are more qualified to say which would suit better for classical.

What I did find with Ivory was that once you I got it installed locally it sounded better to what it is on there due to band width issues only allowing you to do so much. I assume the same would be true of the vintage D when comparing a local installation versus try-sound.

I was only able to really use 24 voices max on try-sound and anything more I would get the slow disk message on Ivory. Vintage D is less resource hungry over IP and worked a bit better on try-sound if anything I thought.

Having installed Ivory on a solid state drive at home though the PC can handle it easily with no such restrictions.

Could you please provide a sample which shows this problem?

Here is mine which I recorded using the keys you have mentioned:

Audio-002.mp3

To me, each single note sounds more or less the same, depending on touch and velocity.
If at all there are only faint differences which in my opinion add to the realism.

By the way, this is the default setting for Concert Grand. It's not really good and changing the parameters of Sound and Virtual Technician as well as Reverb seem necessary to get a better and more realistic feeling. But that's another story.

I think there are differences in sound with some of the notes, but it is not my intention to be too critical of the MP11, but to find out whether anybody has experience of using the Galaxy Vintage Steinway D sample.

I've tried the Galaxy Vintage D and Ivory ACD on try-sound. I preferred the ACD, but it's hard to say to what extent that was influenced by whatever the default settings happened to be. The ACD had a more distant concert-hall sound, while the Galaxy was more intimate. I'm not sure to what extent you can tweak this.

On paper the ACD is better (more layers, larger sample-set). However I will probably end up getting the Galaxy since a) it's cheaper b) doesn't require purchase and use of iLok and c) takes up much less space on the SSD. Also I do not need the absolute best available. I think the Galaxy would be more than adequate for me and the existence of something else wouldn't make it any less-so.

Anything that is download-only (Ravenscroft etc) is out of the question for me, since my internet is really slow.

Thank you Rolf.
Sounds fine to me too.

Cheers,
James
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I disagree, I find my Mp11 good enough for classical.
It's better than the Roland fp7f I had before, which was already a good piano (but too boomy in the bass and too light for the touch).

I have Ivory II, Vintage D and Pianoteq 5 but haven't still tried them with the mp11, because I'm satisfied with its sound, and it's a hassle to use virtual pianos on stage (take a PC + soundcard + more cables and the connection is less good than onboard sound).

You have to try different settings of the mp11 parameters (touch, brightness, voicing, damper resonance etc) and it'll better suit your needs

One thing that would be really useful in the future for the MP11 and MP7, would be tone/eq control for individual notes...we now have individual volume per note..tone control as well would be a winner in my view for a software upgrade.
Also any new AP sounds to be available on USB...I would be happy to pay for that. It would take the MP7 and MP11 to a new level

Very off putting for aNY potencial buyer of Kawai keyboards.

Does anyone know which country they are made in?

On the contrary. It would make these pianos even more desirable to existing and potential buyers.

That's an interesting concept, but I'm not so sure it would be very easy to implement.

Yeah, at the moment, all the tone and EQ etc effects are applied globally. Even damper resonance is applied as a global effect, which is why the tone suddenly and unrealistically changes on existing held notes when you press the pedal. To do this on a note-by-note basis would require a redesign of the effects to work on individual note pipelines and probably require significantly more processing power. But the RD800 does it, so why not.

Aside: what's the difference between tone and EQ? Is the tone control just an EQ envelope, perhaps added before reverb and other effects, and the EQ effect added after, or is there more to it? I imagine what you can do with a sampled sound is pretty limited compared to modelled or partially modelled synthesis.

Perhaps if enough people showed an interest, maybe it could get back to Kawai.
As has been said..If the RD800 does it..why not

Because of hardware. On the RD-800, this has been solved by the embedded DSP.
Concerning the Kawai, it should be similar. The current DSP does not foresee this feature and so it is highly questionable if any current instrument would see this feature. In the future, maybe the MP12 (13, 14?) could perhaps make use of it, if their DSPs would feature such a tool. But it really depends on the implementation and the willingness of the engineering team.

Hmmm... if you could give all the notes in a E chord the same tone/EQ while other notes had different tone/EQ, that could prove to be quite interesting! Definitely has me thinking!!

Are you sure the RD-800 allows adjustment of damper resonance on a note-by-note basis?

I know it's possible to set the tuning, volume, and voicing of individual notes, but I believe additional parameters related to resonances etc. are applied to the entire keyboard.

Kind regards,
James
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