Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Galaxy Vintage D: impressions using with CA95, and questions

OK, I'm about 4 years late for the party, but a couple of days ago I got my hands on the Vintage D. From my limited pre-purchase testing, I thought the more current Ivory American D sounded better, but it costs more, takes up 10x the SSD space, and requires a pesky iLok. So Vintage D it was.

First impressions
From the start, I'm running the sounds via my audio interface into the CA95's Line-In. My first impression was very "meh". The "Basic Grand" seemed rather dull and lifeless. The "Concert Hall" preset had ridiculous levels of reverb, and some others of the rather limited set of 12 presets were of the silly-season use-once-and-forget variety ("Spherical piano"??).

I did quickly notice the bizarre-sounding D#3, which sounds completely different to its neighbours when played mf or louder. I can probably live with it.

Second impressions
Then I got round to the Brilliant Pop preset, and things got better. Wow! The clarity of tone sounds amazing on the CA95. That's something that the CA95's main Kawai EX sample shares, but I could never get from Pianoteq, which sounds (great, but comparatively) muddy and unclear over the CA95's speakers, in the bass particularly.

Changing the DP's touch from my usual "Heavy" to "Normal" improved the "Basic Grand" preset a lot, and I'm sure it's possible to edit the velocity curve in Kontakt so that I don't have to manually switch all the time.

Overall I'm very impressed with the sound quality. The dynamics I get when playing are much better than I get using the CA95 or Pianoteq. And while I think Pianoteq doesn't work that well over the speakers, Vintage D sounds fantastic, just as good, and probably better (when I've got the hang of tweaking), than the internal sounds.

Tweaking
I've only just begun experimenting with tweaking the sounds. But I can tell that the control is quite remarkable for a sampled instrument, and being able to do stuff like easily adjust stereo width is very handy. I suspect I'll be making different presets for using with headphones and over the CA95's speakers, since the two sound very different. Or maybe I can work out how to configure some insert which I can switch on to do some EQ for one or the other.

Performance and latency
I've had a few annoying pops and glitches. This is much worse when running inside Cubase, rather than standalone or within SAVIhost, where it's mainly OK. My buffer is set at the minimum 64 samples, which according to the driver gives an Output Latency of 5 ms (obviously the actual latency, including receiving MIDI messages and play the sound, will be somewhat greater). I increased the number of samples to push the latency to 10 ms or so, which, being an extra 1/200th of a second, shouldn't be noticeable, but it really is. My theory is that the latency increase is actually much greater; maybe some day I'll get round to measuring it. But at the 64 samples level no latency is noticeable and the piano feels very responsive, probably more-so than Pianoteq.

Anyway, some questions of the n00b variety:

1) In their default forum, the Global Presets are not really usable for me, since repedalling / half pedalling / una corda are all turned off, which I always want to be on, as well as some tweaking to reverb etc. Is there any way to update these presets?

2) What's the best way of saving custom presets? The obvious one is as a .nka file using the Global Presets menu, but according to this thread

Can that be right? Saving a whole new instrument to change the position of a couple of knobs and sliders?

Or are you supposed to use these mysterious "multis" in a .nkb file?

Perhaps there's a way to display your .nka files in the browser on the left hand side?

What happened to .fxp files as the standard for VST programs?

I'm probably over-thinking this. How do you guys save and recall your custom presets?

3) Is it possible to easily select these presets, e.g. via a MIDI controller? (The Load User Preset option requires selecting a file using the Windows file selector; not sure how you'd do this without a mouse.)

4) What's going on with the Pad Machine when you use the sustain pedal? Say you're holding the sustain pedal, you hold down another chord, and release the sustain pedal (or release and repedal, to clear the previous chord). The piano sounds keeps playing (of course), but the pad cuts out as if it's been damped. I can't find any mention of this problem via Google. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?

Yes, some of the presets are ridiculous. I just chose one, tweaked it, and saved it under another name.
This is not possible:Kontakt does not support it, according to experts on another board. (Too bad!)

NASA rockets are launched from pads. But pianos don't have pads.
Yet this one thinks it should. And it does. And it's crap. I just ignore it.

Ohhhh.....


What if I want to play, say... Candle In The Wind at a big funeral? Where would we be without the ol' piano and strings, eh?

Lolatu, I tink JFP, dmd and others already wrote some posts on this matter (vst+CA95/ES7) and how to get the most of it.

Lolatu, so, finally, which one sounded better and was better to play - Kawai as it is or Galaxy?

On D#3:
https://www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/1975071/Re:_Vintage_D.html
Edited: broken link

this RapidShare link doesnt seem to work for me.

I can try to re-upload my .nki solutions to the d#3 problem if I find a usable file-storage service ...but it will take me a couple days (I won't be home for some time)

If you tweak your settings, and choose the file button, and save as default multi, your new settings will stay when you open the Kontakt.

One random thing I found was change different Sample Rate. I initially figured my latency would be lower using 44100 (thinking it uses less processing power), but I think the samples are recorded at 96000. If your sound card/driver can process it, then the latency ends up being lower because it doesn't have to down sample the sample in real time.

Congratz on your purchase & thanks for your impressions on the Galaxy D.
If you have the opportunity to post an mp3, I would be interested to hear how it sounds (with pedaling, ..).

Not at all, Galaxy is sampled at 44.1KHz; latency decrease you observe is simply because each buffer "lasts less" as you increse the frequency, so for example 64 @48KHz will givo you twice the latency than the same buffer @96Khz but using this frequency will stress more the CPU and I/O, so is not the best choice. Use it at 44.1 with the lowest "glitch free" buffer

Thanks for clarifying, so the sample rate doesn't refer to the sample rate of the... well, samples? And it only seems to work for the computer sound card, when the output is changed to a USB sound card, it only allows 44.1?

Anyway, 44.1 may use less CPU, but the latency is too long for me. It was greater than 12 ms, which I didn't notice consciously, but when I was playing fast pieces (e.g. Winter wind etude) my finger brain coordination was lost. I thought i was having a stroke, but it would disappear when I switched back to the on board piano sound. My current setup is 256 polyphony at 96000 seems to give me an (in-computer) latency of less than 5 ms which is completely imperceptible to me.

Thanks - I'll have to do some searching.


I'm somewhat reluctant to make judgements at this stage, other than to present my early impressions for what they're worth, since they'll probably change as I become more familiar with the instrument. I am certainly enjoying the Vintage D at the moment, since like I said, it seems to have better dynamics, as you might expect with 13 layers of sampling compared to Kawai's 4 layers, and there seems to be more range between quiet and loud (i.e. less compression, though Galaxy has compression controls if you want it). The Steinway sound is nice for a change. I'm not particularly bothered by looping since HI-XL has a generous (by historical standards) 4 s or so per note, which is longer than most notes I play.

I think a major factor in how good the instrument sounds in practice is the ease of use of the user interface. It is much more likely you'll get the sound you want if all the controls are laid out in front of you. The Kawai requires diving into several different sub-menus, pressing buttons on the small screen, and once saved in a registration, you can't even see what the settings are or change them. All the "Basic" and "Virtual Technician" settings are carried from one sound to the next, while the Effects and Reverb settings aren't. The Vintage D has all the parameters the CA95 has plus more, including useful ones like Tone Colour (adjusts sample layer trigger velocities without affecting volume), and graphical velocity curves. So I would say it's much easier to get a good sounds with the Vintage D.

It also feels good to play. It sounds very clear over the speakers and I get the same sort of vibration feedback as I do with the internal sounds. Whereas I don't get the same vibration and clarity with Pianoteq. I'd definitely recommend it, though it's possible there are other options just as good.

Thanks. But (call me greedy), I'd like to be able to save a number of different set-ups.

Does anyone use the "Quick-Load Catalog" (which I've just discovered) for this?

Well there are a lot of demos already available on the Galaxy site, and on Youtube. I'm not sure what some more would add. What I might do is to record the output over the CA95's speakers and post a comparison of internal sounds, Vintage D, and Pianoteq. It can never be completely fair because it may be possible to set up the sounds in a better way than I know how (and in the case of Pianoteq, I only have the Stage version, and there's a lot more you can change in the Standard and Pro versions). Another problem is that I don't have a working microphone so I'd have to use my mobile phone...

lolatu, thank you for posting your experiences so far. It's interesting that you preferred the CA95's 'Normal' touch curve to that of 'Heavy'.

What are the main specifications of your PC, by the way?

Regarding this point:



May I ask why you believe the number of velocity layers to be 4? Please note that I'm not suggesting that you are either correct or incorrect, however this information is not listed in any owner's manuals or brochures, partly because we encourage customers to judge an instrument based on how it plays and sounds, rather than purely on technical specifications.

Cheers,
James
x

Lolatu

A question. Do you know of anyone who generates the sound from an external computer but instead of using external speakers or line-in, uses external amps and then bypasses the internal amps and goes directly to the internal speakers/soundboard?

I find it it interesting too. Although I'd say "interesting" is an euphemism for sad. On all Kawai pianos I've owned I had to use "heavy" touch when playing the internal piano sound since "normal" is way too jumpy in velocities and thus unrealistic. However if I control external sounds through MIDI or playing other internal sounds such as electric pianos, "normal" is OK. And it seems I am not alone judging by this and many other threads.

So, isn't it time for Kawai engineers to reconsider what is a "normal" touch for the main piano sound? I guess it won't be difficult for a real piano manufacturer as Kawai to not only figure out a good default piano touch but why not even a more elaborate measurement of their real piano velocity-to-sound-dynamic map by the use of sensors in a real piano that would then translate to an ultra realistic touch curve in digital pianos

You can reduce latency @44.1Khz as well by reducing the audio buffer to 128 or less in Kontakt's settings, which is the correct way to achieve it.

This is what I read long time ago, I thought it was both JFP and dmd who did it.
Anyway...to do so, I'd sell the CA95 and buy a VPC1. 3k is way too expensive for a controler!