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I have finally found the source of some white noise I could hear while practising with headphone: the right pedal.
Whenever I press it, it generates a short burst of white noise (half a second) which decays shortly after.

It happens with or without pressing a key.

I have tried various modes (pianist, sound, instruments) and it is a constant.

I always had the impression someone was getting into the room behind me, now I know where it comes from. And it is most disturbing while playing.

It actually happens without headphones as well if I put the ear right next to the speakers, but with headphones it is really noticeable.

Cannot say when it started happening: I did not notice it when the piano arrived (2 months ago), but it has lasted at least 2 weeks now? But I was not using much the pedal before.

Is it supposed to imitate a real acoustic piano?

Cheers

Replying to myself.

I think it is a feature as the harder I press it, the louder the "noise".
Tried without any favourite and still happens.
I guess I will have to hit the manual.

Its a simulation of the strings in a real piano making some noise as the dampers are released. I think its realistic - I only touch an acoustic upright occasionally since it was "inherited" by my daughter, but I remember the same sound from when it was sitting in our house.

It's pedal noise simulation. You can adjust the volume in "Virtual technician" menu.

Thank you guys.
What is "odd" is how loud it becomes with headphones compared to speakers.

I tried cheap phone headphones or more decent ATH-M20x and it is very similar.

Or, I press the pedal way too much.

Will do some experimenting and report.

Cheers

Yes indeed.

Here's a slide from the CA98/CA78 dealer sales manual that details the Damper Noise/Fall-back Noise Virtual Technician parameters. It doesn't really contain any sensitive information, but explains the features quite nicely, so I'm happy to post it here.



Depending on the resolution of your monitor/viewing device, you may need to zoom in or open the image in a new tap in order to see the text clearly.

Cheers,
James
x

These piano noises (hammer noise, pedal noise, string noise, and damper noise) are not present on my piano, but I noticed them with my VST pianos.
Yes, these noises are very noticeable with headphones. They're annoying, so I just keep them turned off.

In summary: go to the settings menu > Virtual Technician > Damper Noise and then reduce the value or turn it off. Other two sources of "noise" you might want to adjust are the Key-off Effect and the Fall-back Noise. Check the manual (EN) on pages 106, 110, 111 for more info. By the way, such noises may actually be louder on some acoustic pianos.

The reason you experience what seems to be louder noise through headphones is not odd. Noise includes high frequency sound waves. The higher a frequency the more directional a sound wave is. So, when such effects are reproduced by the speakers you will not get some of the directional sound waves due to the speaker setup and placement. When listening through headphones, those directional sound waves will get directly into your ears and such effects become more noticeable, although they are not "louder". Anyway, some of these effects, especially the middle/low frequencies on the simulated action noises, should also be noticeable through the speakers when playing with quiet dynamics and with a high enough volume - try setting the speaker volume between dot 4-5 out of 7.

Interesting take on it by Kawai, effectively "the noise is there so you can learn to play to keep it from playing." I similarly noticed this when I got my ES110. Interestingly, Yamaha doesn't simulate it, at least on my CLP-685. I actually had no idea that pianists were trained in pedal technique to remove the sound, so today I learned something thanks to Kawai James

Coincidentally I was working on some pedaling last night with my teacher on his acoustic grand and was noticing how loud the mechanism was, lots of sort of a soft thudding when it was depressed. It's also physically much harder to press the pedal than on either of my digitals. I was thinking that would be a benefit of the Novus NV-10 having a real damper mechanism versus the Yamaha N's. The Yamaha pedal is quite "forgiving" compared to an acoustic.

I did not know about that either:My take, though, is the lack of such noises on my digital (or the ability to disable same on my VSTs) makes the digital superior to an acoustic (at least in this one small way).

I cannot imagine that piano designers now or in the past ever WANTED such noises. Rather, the noises are just artifacts of a fully mechanical beast. And the digital can do away with them entirely. Good!

Now if only they could put more emphasis on making the DESIRED sounds better mimic those an acoustic piano ...

Sometimes the pedal release noise is used as an "artistic" effect:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeflLi_Dx7E&feature=youtu.be&t=5m11s

And of course other times it's just frowned upon.

You can depress the loud pedal to the beat of your music, so the sustain is not overbearing, and the sound of said depression forms a pleasant percussive effect. I love these effects on Pianoteq, key fall back noise is in there too. And - they sound different on different pianos! What is there not to like?

Indeed, I have lowered the Dumper Noise to 3 which is much more tolerable.

But but but, instead of playing I spent the last half an hour messing around with settings!!!!! argh!!!!! And I still cannot get them to the correct values!

Kawai, please, please, please do something about this awful mess!
You dont want to fix it? Ok, at least document the zillions of bugs properly so we can found a reliable workaround!

Now after numerous attempts, I have the damper noise = 3 in Pianist Model but I cannot get it right in Sound Mode, it is always 5!
I want to play not get frustrated!

Pianist Mode and each instrument in Sound Mode have different Virtual Technician preference. We can save it to Favorites, but Once we saved the preferences to "favorites" we can't simply edit it (though there is a pretty complicated way to do it). I am hoping a software update for CA98/78 and NV10 available soon.
For now, VST is pretty reliable for me.

Hello Audetto,



That's good to hear (pun intended).



I'm sorry to hear that. May I ask you to explain why you were having difficulty selecting the desired value for this setting?



As Faiz correctly noted above, the Virtual Technician parameters in Pianist mode and Sound mode are adjusted and stored independently. Moreover, in Sound mode each instrument has its own Virtual Technician memory.

This behaviour is described in the Virtual Technician section of the CA98/CA78 owner's manual (p101 and elsewhere):



I hope this helps.

Kind regards,
James
x

One thing I can't work around is that I want to save individual settings for each instrument to their own file. So when I want to play the Ex-Concert Grand, I can just go favourites and load that setting. But saving to favourites for a particular instrument seems to save all other settings for other instruments also. And I'm still not quiet sure what is the function of "Save Sound", can anyone give an example of how to use it correctly, because it doesn't seem to save anything for me...

I'm not sure what you mean by this, so I can't be of help with it.

But I can help with this:

The "Save to Sound" menu item is part of the Virtual Technician menu. It's effect is, that the current VT settings are stored for the currently selected "sound". If you don't do this, then upon the next restart, all changed VT settings will fall back to their defaults.
For example, if you have changed the "Voicing" to "Bright" and the "Touch" to "Light", then you can play with these settings temporarily, and after a restart they will fall back to their defaults "Normal" and "Normal".
But if you change them and then do a "Save to Sound", then the changes will survive the next restart.
So in essence, "Save to Sound" allows you to define your own VT defaults (that are applied after a restart), individually for each "sound".

So what is a "sound"?

Pianist Mode counts as one "sound", i.e. there is one set of VT settings that applies to pianist mode, no matter what rendering character you have selected (i.e. "Classic", "Romantic", whatever). They all share the same VT settings, and changing the VT in one rendering character also changes it for the other characters.

In Sound Mode, each instrument counts as its own "sound" and therefore also has its own separate VT settings. I.e. sound mode SK-EX, sound mode EX, sound mode SK-5, etc., they all are separate "sounds", with separate VT settings. So changing the VT settings for one of them does not change the same settings for any of the others (or for pianist mode).

Spot on JoBert.

It's perhaps worth noting that prior to the CA97/CA67, the Virtual Technician parameters were global - i.e. any adjustments made to one sound would also be applied to all of the other sounds. This meant that you couldn't have one piano sound with String Resonance = 5, but another piano sound with String Resonance = 10 - it was always one of the other (unless you used Registrations, but that's a separate topic).

With the introduction of the CA97/CA67, each sound was effectively given its own Virtual Technician memory, which coincided with the introduction of new SK-EX and SK-5 samples, allowing the SK-EX and EX to be adjusted independently.

The CA98/CA78's Sound mode is essentially the CA97/CA67 sound engine, so it inherits the same independent adjustments. However, we also have the new Pianist mode, which is a completely different sound engine, also with its own, independent VT adjustments.

Kind regards,
James
x

Can anyone explain the exact use cases expected when using Favourites and "Save to Sound"?

I believe "Save to Sound" should only save the settings inside the VT menu as explained in the manual. This means that all other settings outside this menu should not be saved, including the character, resonance and ambience level/type in pianist mode. The same applies to other non-VT settings.

What settings are supposed to be saved when creating a Favourite?

What settings are automatically saved by the system, even if save to sound or favourites is not used?

Is "Save to Sound" designed to be used along with Favourites? If so, how? What is supposed to happen when a Favourite is selected and then Pianist or Sound mode is selected afterwards? What settings should apply in this case? Should the settings that were "saved to sound" loaded? And what if that instrument was not "saved to sound"'? What settings apply then?

What is supposed to happen, for example, when a Sound Model instrument that was "saved to sound" is selected and then we select another instrument either in Sound or Pianist Mode that was not "saved to sound"? What settings should be loaded in this case?

I think it would be very useful if we understand what were the original design goals behind these features.

This is correct.

Essentially, all the VT settings, plus some other settings that are not VT settings: The piano voice (i.e. pianist mode + rendering character or sound mode + selected voice), the pianist mode resonance level (only for pianist mode, obviously), the ambience/reverb setting, plus the settings from the "Sound Settings" menu, plus the metronome settings. (Maybe also some others I forgot.)

Almost none. I'm only aware of some settings in the "Settings" menu that are saved automatically. The ones I'm aware of are "Auto Display Off" and "Auto Power Off". There may be some others, but very few.

Yes.

While the favorite is selected, almost all settings are governed by that favorite, i.e. all settings that are actually stored in the favorite are also applied. That includes the selected instrument, rendering character, ambience/reverb, VT settings, plus the settings from the "Sound Settings" menu.
As soon as you switch away from the favorite to pianist or sound mode, the favorite settings are no longer used at all, instead the current settings of the pianist mode or the selected sound mode instrument are used, together with the current settings of the "Sound Settings" menu. The settings from the favorite are no longer in effect.

In that case, the settings from the second selected sound mode instrument (or pianist mode) are now in effect. The settings of the previous sound mode instrument are no longer in effect. The settings from the "Sound Settings" menu remain in effect, as they are shared between all instruments.

(For simplicity's sake, I left out the complications that are introduced by using the "Startup with Favorite" option.)

So why do we have "Save to Sound" and also favorites? Why not only one?

"Save to Sound" allows you to define startup defaults for the individual VT's of the individual instruments. You would use this to store your preferred VT configuration for each instrument, so that this preference is restored upon startup.

But even if you have found your preferred VT configurations for all instruments and have stored them in this fashion, at times you may want to play with different settings anyway.

To do this, you can go into the VT to make ad-hoc temporary changes. You don't have to be afraid that you will lose your preferred settings, because they will be restored at the next restart. (Or if during the course of playing with some temporary change you realize that you like it better than your previous preferred settings, you can of course do another "Save to Sound" to make the temporary changes "permanent".)

If you happen to do such ad-hoc temporary changes frequently, and always the same changes, then it might be a bit bothersome that you have to go into the VT and manually configure it each time. However, you may not want to do a "Save to Sound" because even though you frequently use a certain VT configuration, you still use your actual preferred VT configuration (the one that you did "Save to Sound") more often and don't want to overwrite it. That's when you would store your temporary configuration into a favorite, so that you can recall it more easily, without having to go into the VT. So you end up with a hierarchy:

• The most preferred configuration is "Saved to Sound" (individually for each instrument!)
• One or more other (slightly less) preferred configurations are saved as "Favorites"
• Very seldom used ad-hoc (or single use) temporary configurations are not stored at all but are configured manually in the VT when you need them