Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Casio PX-160 or Yamaha P-125 for Beginner

Here's what I see at the Casio website for the PX-160:

"Casio’s proprietary sound source, “AiR” (Acoustic and intelligent Resonator) provides the grand piano sounds in the PX-160. Casio meticulously recorded the sound of a 9-foot concert grand at 4 dynamic levels. The AiR engine delivers this sound with seamless dynamics for a remarkably expressive and powerful performance. Damper Resonance is simulated by AiR for uncanny realism when the damper pedal is used."

https://www.casio.com/products/electronic-musical-instruments/stage-pianos/px-160

Where are you seeing the claim of "string resonance"? (Not saying you're wrong; genuinely asking.)

+1 -- and easy to forget while discussing minutiae.

The sound of the PX-160 is ok: relatively speaking it was competitive at its release. Which I would pick would depend upon which action I liked the best. I haven't touched a P125, only heard it. The P-125 sounds good but it's a brand new release, so it should sound a bit better.

If you already own a laptop or desktop, for a small investment, you could later pick up a VST instrument (Pianoteq, CFX grand etc) that would allow you to improve the sound significantly. The big question for pianists is whether the action is the best for the price; the logic goes, if I can spend a few dollars to improve the sound, then this is less important a factor than action.

I would concentrate on the action---which feels best to you? As sound can always be cured with a VST at a later date, picking one with the best action gives you an instrument that might last you longer. This is why I would compare all the instruments if you can. Sometimes, it is possible to find the same action on another model i.e., if you are not able to find the exact instrument to test.

At the price point of the PX-160 / P-125 you should not expect much. Both are pretty decent for the buck. I prefer the Yamaha P-125 because Yamaha generally has better quality control and is a better known brand name in the digital piano world. The Yamaha also has a built-in USB audio interface which will make messing around with virtual piano software easy if you ever choose to do that.

But if the USB audio interface isn't something that you are interested in, try both and pick the one you like. If you can't try both out just pick one randomly. The difference between these two isn't going to mount to a hill of beans.

Interesting: "USB audio interface which will make messing around with virtual piano software" ... I wonder how ?
Also, according to specification P-125 has "USB TO HOST" only, nothing says it's "USB audio".

IMHO, PX-160 is excellent MIDI controller.

https://usa.yamaha.com/files/download/other_assets/9/1154149/p125_en_om_a0.pdf
page 24 in the manual.

I also used it on my P-125. Pretty sure its there.

It's actually odd how understated a case Yamaha makes for USB Audio Out on the p-125 and p-515. Very few budget/mid-range (or even high end) DPs support it. And understandably, almost anyone who doesn't know how DPs work just intuitively expects all DPs to do so

Yamaha also silently introduced USB digital audio support on the CLP-600 range with a firmware update some months ago...

IMO a feature that should be pretty standard with new products these days. Even my Roland D-05 has it.

USB Audio has been standardized for years, but I guess you will need to tell that to the big DP brands :-)

Today, USB Audio is supported by some synths/workstations but not by most digital and stage pianos. For example, Roland supports it, but not on their digital piano range, including the new high-end LX-700 series (according to the official specs). Kawai and Casio DPs offer no USB Audio support as well. AFAIK, Yamaha is the only brand that updated their firmware and is now supporting USB Audio on their digital pianos, including the CLP and P ranges. What makes matters worse is that USB Audio is just a software protocol that runs on top of the USB hardware that the DPs already have. This means that introducing USB Audio is about updating the system software/firmware. The lack of current support means that the manufacturers are either introducing an artificial limitation to discriminate between synths and DPs or are simply unable or unwilling to adapt their own software...

Could it also be that the existing USB hardware utilised by most DPs simply does not support such a feature?

You could argue that DP manufacturers should offer a coffee warmer feature via a software update, however if there is no hotplate hardware already mounted on the instrument, it's unlikely that you will be able to realise such functionality simply with a few additional lines of code.

Kind regards,
James
x

;-) This is not about adding functionality that requires hardware that is not installed on a device. USB Audio is not a piece of hardware but a data protocol specification that uses the communication capabilities provided by a standard USB chipset. USB Audio requires a USB compliant controller and software that sends/receives data according to the USB Audio specification. So, only a DP that does not have USB support or one that does not allow software updates would be automatically excluded.

Now, most DPs include a USB (2.0) compliant chipset with USB host and USB to-device modes. This USB chipset is connected to the data bus of the DP since its "sound engine" is able to use it to read/write MIDI data and read/write audio streams (and other data formats) over USB. If the software is updated to send out digital audio data to the USB chipset according to the USB Audio specification, then the device would become USB Audio compliant. This is the exactly the same as how MIDI data can be sent and received over USB: it in not about the USB hardware at all but about having software in place that can send and receive MIDI messages according to their specification.

A software update was how many devices with completely standard USB chipsets became USB Audio compliant. The list includes portable media players, car media systems and game consoles. This is also how older iOS devices and dozens of Android devices can use USB Audio over standard USB hardware. Amazingly, even some DP manufacturers have been able to introduce this capability via a simple software update ;-) Not being able to do so on a DP that already includes a fully capable USB chipset and the ability to update its software raises many questions about the actual quality of the software running under the hood...

I think that arc7urus' argument makes many assumptions about the structure of a DP's hardware. In particular, the assumption of a "data bus" may be incorrect. A DP is _not_ a general-purpose computer. Its connections between the "digital world" and the "analog world" may be quite different from the internals of my PC.

And it may be impossible to re-purpose the internal DAC and ADC to act as "USB sound cards".

If James says "it's hard or impossible to do with existing hardware", I'm inclined to believe him.

Hey all, thanks so much for all the help - I ended up picking up a Yamaha P-125 demo unit bundle (w/ x-style stand and x-frame bench) for a deal I couldn't pass up. Thanks to y'all, I felt comfortable buying a Used unit and snatched all that up for about the cost of a new Casio PX-160 (slab only). Will let you know how it goes when it finally arrives!

The assumptions I am making are: (1) the DP has a USB 2.0 controller that can be used for MIDI and digital audio recording and (2) the software of the DP (aka "system firmware") can be updated.


There are no DACs or ADCs involved since there is no need for any kind of digital/analogue conversion. An ADC is used to convert an input analogue audio signal to a digital signal. So, no ADCs are involved. A DAC is used to convert the digital audio to an analogue signal (e.g. to be amplified and directed to to the line-outs, speakers or headphones). With USB Audio the audio data must be sent to the USB controller in digital format, not in analogue format, so no DAC is involved. Actually, if a DAC-ADC-DAC pipeline was used the audio signal would degrade, which is one of the issues that USB Audio tries to avoid. When you are recording audio from the DP to a USB device the DAC is also not involved. This scenario is similar.

To support USB Audio a DP must be able to send a digital audio stream to a USB controller in a specific format along with a number of control messages. This digital audio stream is already available since many DPs support recording in uncompressed PCM and compressed MP3 formats. USB Audio would use the same PCM audio stream used for digital recording. Adding support to USB Audio is similar to supporting MIDI over USB or digitally recording in different audio formats. It is about having that functionality in the software. Moreover, a DP would only need to support the simplest of USB Audio modes, called isochronous transfer, which sends a "real time" digital audio stream from a host to a device.


Certainly KJ knows more about the limitations of the architecture used in DPs than us. But the fact is that software updates have been able to add USB Audio support to the "existing hardware" of several devices, not only DPs. If you just look at DPs, USB Audio was introduced to multiple models from Roland, Korg, Yamaha, Dexibell and Dynatone, to name a few. So, it is definitely not "hard or impossible". If a DP cannot be upgraded in such a way, then it would be interesting to know what were the design flaws that introduced that limitation.

A few thoughts on the above:

1. Are these new, unanticipated features that were built into new software of existing DPs, or does the software merely implement what was originally intended in the design spec (but not released day zero because it wasn't ready)? My guess would be that anything that currently supports USB Audio-Out today (but not at release) falls in the latter camp rather than the former.

2. Is it a bit charged to claim that anything that doesn't support USB Audio Out on a technical level has a "design flaw?" If it was never part of the design spec, then I would be hard-pressed to conclude that being able to implement it afterwards with only a firmware update is a trivial operation...

It's funny that this is all about USB audio ... in a thread covering bottom-of-the-line pianos.
These are just the pianos that you silence ... and connect them to a VST in order to get the piano to sound like a piano.

All the USB audio would do is let you record the native crap sound as digital rather than analog. But crap is crap in either format, eh?

Hello Charles,



Thank you for expressing your confidence in my opinion, however with the greatest respect, my response to arc7urus did not actually state the words quoted.

There are a multiple factors that developers must consider when planning software/firmware updates. Hardware limitations are of course one factor, however there may also be software limitations, or the potential for a new feature to adversely affect existing features, or introduce additional bugs etc.

I often see posts stating "oh, the manufacturer can add that with an update" from PW members who probably do not have intimate knowledge of the hardware/software used by an instrument, nor experience working as a developer in a commercial environment (although I appreciate that the latter does not necessarily apply to arc7urus).

Anyway, I appreciate that this is getting away from the original topic of this thread, for which I apologise to the OP.

Kind regards,
James
x

The USB Audio specification is not new and DP manufacturers have been using off-the-shelf USB 2.0 controllers for many years. The data required for USB Audio is the same PCM uncompressed audio stream that most DPs are able to record to an USB device. Complying to USB Audio (out, streaming) means sending that audio stream to the same USB controller using a different message structure.

So, my guess is different than yours. I would say some DP manufacturers eventually realized supporting USB Audio was straightforward. Therefore, when they developed the system software for some new DP model they added USB Audio support. Since the current range of DPs will very likely share the same third-party USB controller, they concluded with was much easier (and cheaper) to reuse that part of the software across models instead of maintaining multiple firmware versions. And then USB Audio started popping up in devices that were not planned to have that feature. If a DP manufacturer decides to include flac/lossless audio recording on a new model, such change could also be trivially cascaded to many other models. This is about exploiting the available hardware, not adding exotic features.


Not being able to properly update the software to use a new data format is a design flaw. The software should be decoupled from that communications hardware. Let me give you an example: DP manufacturers are now finally starting to support Bluetooth BLE for Audio and MIDI. It should be irrelevant if a MIDI message is coming from a serial MIDI port, a USB port or over Bluetooth. The "sound engine" should process MIDI messages regardless of the hardware controller responsible for communicating them. However, a MIDI message must be communicated differently when using USB, Bluetooth or the serial port, since the data transmission protocols are different. But these different formats should not complicate the software.

The same reasoning applies to USB Audio. DPs already support reading and writing data streams in different formats to USB devices. If a DP is designed to have the system software updated and uses an internal digital audio path, like several DPs from Roland, Yamaha, Korg and Kawai do, then adding USB Audio support is about supporting a new data transmission protocol. Therefore, if the software for some reason cannot be changed, then there is a flaw in the software or in the architecture of the device.

How can you say this?
If the piano does exactly what it was intended to do ... then it is flawless.
If, instead, it doesn't do what you want it to do, that's a shortcoming. In other words, it's a buy-some-other-piano scenario.
It's not a design flaw.