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I'd like to thank you guys for running this thread. It's the most info I've been able to gauge on this instrument. Like Voxpop, I'm thinking of taking the plunge...blind. His ongoing thread helped me decide to take the journey. I've been lugging my Kurzweil K2500 around since I bought it in '97. But I'm finding myself on too many gigs where I have to lug it up stairs to 2nd floor gigs without elevators. It's a back breaker. 22 pounds sounds right up my alley.

I carry it because I play piano on some songs, organ on others, and I love the palette of sounds I've gathered in my 400 and 600 banks to add sounds on my gigs.

However, I find more and more that I just need to play piano and electric piano sounds on many gigs. My rig is too large for all this constant movement. I use the Kurzweil along with a Korg O1/W-fd, and I MIDI a Muse Research Receptor 2 to the Korg, and switch between them for which will be the active soundmaker with the Kurzweil. The KB-1 organ in the Kurzweil is kickass! I've rocked shows using that, and playing keyboard bass with the Korg for years. Last year I added the Receptor.

I run that setup through a Bose sound system with the tower and 2 subs. Great system. Much lighter than carrying the 2 JBLs w/15 & horn. Still, I want to get smaller now to do quicker in/out gigs.

I'm considering the Numa Piano and maybe a Hartke keyboard amp. But I'm still following your saga. I'm almost convinced to take that leap. Which store would you recommend ordering from?

PJHarmonic, I feel your pain - literally! It makes so much sense to try to reduce overall gigging weight, if you can. At just under 25lbs, the Numa Piano has competition from Casio (at half the price), and Nord (NE3HP) at nearly twice the price and ten pounds lighter. I much prefer the Numa's sounds to the Casio; the Nord is much more versatile and has a hugely better organ section, but only offers 73 keys. I find the Numa's middle-ground offering attractive.

The simple but dedicated MIDI controller section of the Numa may be useful if you want to drive the Receptor from that. The original sound pack and effects is good, but is a little clunky in terms of memory/operation. The downloadable update pack streamlines operation considerably but changes the sounds quite a bit. It's not possible to revert to the original firmware once updated, so it's a leap of faith to do the update.

I'm still running on the original firmware with my replacement board, but am toying with the notion of updating again soon, as I'd like the improved functionality, better output/balance, and the enhanced sounds for Clav, Rhodes and AP. However, you lose the 808000000 (IIRC) number 2 organ patch that's useful for backing chords, in favor of a fuller drawbar sound; and the somewhat smaller main grand piano sound, in favor of a much bolder, richer patch. It's a tricky decision to make. TomF has recently done the update - it would be good if you could weigh in, Tom, with your thoughts now you've been playing those sounds on gigs for a few weeks.

I purchased my unit from The Midi-Store in Sedona, AZ. It was an eBay transaction, but when I had problems with the original unit, the distributor's rep worked with the store to resolve the problem competely - I couldn't have wished for better service.

I really love the 'newer' versions of the AP, the Rhodes, and the clav available in the upgrade, but I still am not crazy about the new Bright Piano, so I never use it. I never use it for organ either because I hate triggering organ sounds with a weighted keyboard, and with only two organ sounds available, it's extremely limited anyway. So, I can't really recommend using it as an "all-in-one" keyboard, but I love using it in conjunction with the Numa Organ. They both sound great and are a joy to play.
Most of the gigs I play have a PA provided so normally I just use the 2 keyboards, a small mixer, a Radial DI to sum to mono and my QSC amp for a monitor. Set up and tear down is a breeze, and playing the gig is pure pleasure.

Thanks, guys. I played a Casio PX-3?? at a jam session a few nights ago. That thing was crap! Maybe it was just the one that I played, but there was hardly any ring to the notes about a octave above the center. The notes would "PING!" and drop out. I thought I was going crazy!

I am curious whether I could order the Numa Piano with the upgrades already in it. I don't want to do the online upgrade, and I'd rather have it when I get it. Otherwise, I'll be anguishing over the upgrade like VP. No offense, but I don't want to have to think about it. And I definitely don't want to have to consider boxing it up after receiving it because it did something to me, or I did something to it. Is there a store that I can do 1-on-1 business with who would be responsble?

OK, so having used the (replacement) Numa Piano with original firmware successfully for the past few weeks, I did the upgrade again. Exactly the same problem as before: after programming a patch, the sound disappeared, and only a restart would restore it. I now have an unstable Numa again!

The problem is obviously not hardware, but the new software has a serious bug. I'm surprised that TomF has not yet encountered the issue, unless he is not programming new patches. Tom, are you out there?

I'll do another factory restore and stop programming it to see if that will keep it usable for the time being. I've asked Donovan Stark at American Music and Sound to send me the original firmware. Last time I'd asked for that, but they wanted to replace the piano instead - I'm hoping that this time they'll be able to forward the files.

What a pain! If I manage to get the firmware restored, I shall not attempt the update again...

Sorry Voxpops, I don't check this forum very often. I did finally have the sound disappear on me once about a week ago. A reboot took care of it. I'm going to be contacting AMS to let them know that I've experienced the same issue. I'm hoping that they will come up with a new update that will rectify the problem once and for all.

Sorry to hear that you've caught the bug, too, Tom. But at least it's more likely to get some attention now. I'm mad at myself for tempting fate when I had a perfectly good, working piano with the original firmware. Oh well...

New firmware up at Studiologic-Music site!!!

Tom, I'm going ahead and installing this right now to see if the problem's cured. I'll report back.

OK, so I loaded the new firmware (v2.0), reinstalled the updated pianos - and the Numa software hung on me part way through installation - twice! Now, to be fair, I can't say for certain whether it was the piano, the computer or a combination of both. Anyway, after rebooting both laptop and piano, I started again. Third time lucky! The sounds installed correctly, and then I loaded the updated panel software (v1.19).

I've just programmed half a dozen or so patches, and so far no crashes or other weirdness. Great!

I'm still hoping Studiologic will make the original sounds available for download, so that one can choose which to keep - at the moment the upgrade is irrevocable. Better still, would be TomF's suggestion of having the ability to pick and choose from the total range, a la Nord.

Providing nothing odd happens over the next few days, I'll be comfortable gigging with the Numa again.

Hi,
First of all I would like to thank you for all the valuable information I found in this thread about the Numa Piano (I didn't manage to find a lot of interesting information about this great keyboard on the web besides here!)

I finally decided to buy this keyboard a couple of weeks ago and already had a gig with it!

However, I did have a bad surprise with my Numa Piano when changing a sound and the Numa not playing any sound in the middle of my live set
There was nothing I could do except to stop/restart the piano!

I really love this keyboard (keybed, sounds, direct access to all functions, weight, dedicated MIDI section etc.) however I was a little bit disappointed with the buggy firmware

I would also like to say that I updated to firmware v1.16 and found some other bugs comparing to the original firmware.
For example, when using changing presets on the internal sound module only -with the MIDI module set to off- Numa Piano still sends sends MIDI messages (seems to be "Program Change" messages)!
This can be quite painful if you are juggling with the Numa Piano as a Piano sound module and a midi controller (IE when changing internal sounds, you don't necessarily want the Numa Piano to change the sounds of the external module which is hooked to the Numa Piano's midi out!)

I'll try the latest update (Firmware v1.19 + DSP v2.0) to see if my Numa Piano gets better!

Cheers,
GilJ.

Hi GilJ,

Welcome to the Numa Club!

Yes, the MIDI program change issue is a pain. When I came across that, I think the workaround was to program other patches to send out messages on an unused MIDI channel. I haven't checked out MIDI with the new firmware yet.

Time will tell if the major bugs are now completely cleared up.

A little voice inside my head says probably not.

Oh, Dewster, you're always so full of good cheer!

Unfortunately just being realistic. Developers, for whatever reason, are completely incapable of improving their output beyond maybe 10% or so, and they often backslide just when you're counting on them the most. It usually takes a complete housecleaning to move significantly one way or the other.

Thank you voxpops and thanks for the workaround! (though I am not sure it will work for me as I am using the Numa Piano's MIDI module to control a virtual instrument that doesn't take into account midi channels )
I'll send a bug request to Studiologic's support and see how they deal with their new customers!

By the way, anyone know what's new in the latest update?

Cheers,
GilJ.

That's good to hear voxpops. Mine hasn't done anything wierd since that one time,but I plan to do the update in December. Thanks for the update, and keep us posted.

Ok, I was going to wait 'till December to load the updates, but I went ahead and did it anyway and I'm really glad I did. I don't know what they did, but to me, all of the sounds are improved. I hadn't liked the "bright" piano since the original version, but this one is really nice. They may not have actually 'changed' any of the sounds (I don't know), but I suspect they tweaked the preamp and action algorythms.
The biggest problem I had with the upgrade was figuring out how to get the jzip to work.
I do wish they had upgraded the loader and the instructions, but I'm used to them now, so it's not a big deal.
This version seems very stable, and I haven't run into any strange behavior and I put it through a lot of paces today. So far so good.

Thanks for the report, Tom. When I loaded the new firmware, the original updated SoundPack 1 was still on the site, and so I used the big sound file from that. Now they've replaced it, although it's exactly the same size as the earlier version and still called Pack 1 - so I'm not sure if it's different or not. I hadn't noticed any obvious changes to the sounds - although I have had very little time to play with the NUMA recently. I may try updating again with this new file, to see if there's any difference.

My NUMA now appears to be stable, too, so I'm happy! It's such a good little gigging piano, and I enjoy playing it.

I also did the last update (firmware v1.19 and DSP v2.0) a couple of days ago.
Didn't really notice any sound improvement, but it seems that there are less weirdness now (haven't had the need to restart the Numa Piano so far, after sound stopping playing or Numa freezing etc.!)

However, the bugs for the MIDI Module of the Numa Piano are still here (I think that there are even some new ones! )
E.g. even if the MIDI Module is set to off, MIDI data are still being transmitted to the MIDI Out port: messages such as Pitch Bend, Sustain Pedal, Program Changes when changing internal presets... even the Midi Volume knob now transmits information which you generally don't want when the MIDI Module is... switched off!

Cheers,
GilJ.

Gil, I don't use any virtual instruments so I couldn't check that out, but I hooked up two hardware modules (Motif ES & Ketron), and the midi controller section worked fine.
Just a stab in the dark ... are you using the USB port to 'drive' the virtual instruments?