Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Kawai announces Concert Artist CA99 and CA79 digital pianos

Cybergene I can only agree with that!

come to think of it, we should all get a piece of the pie.

And with better quality control and reliability and Kawaii UK support as good as that provided by Kawaii James then all will indeed be well in the Kawaii world!

I’m really starting to dig the CA99 a lot. I really like the cabinet design and that it has some updated features but also the price. Once I can compare a NV5 to the CA99 I will know for sure which one should be my next piano. Well also depends on that Yamaha will bring to the table at musikmesse.

Hopefully there will be some comparisons soon between the NV5 and the CA99 and thoughts on the actions and if it’s really worth the extra money also considering the the NV5 has older tech.

So all kawai digital pianos use samples stored in ROM, same as yamaha and casio etc.. Piano samples using probably between 4 and 8mb in total! That's thousands of pounds, even tens of thousands (digital grands) for a block of wood and metal with a ROM chip shoved inside... Yet there are piano samples in gb for a hundred dollars online, these companies are taking your money in return for ancient tech and minimal effort, it's a crime in this day and age. Yes the speakers may be good and the action but how dare they charge for using ROM chip samples.

Huh?Not so. The samples on my 2005-era piano total around 24 MB. The sizes are much larger today.

Wrong again. When a willing buyer and a willing seller exchange legitimate money for legitimate goods ... there is no crime. Not in this day and age, nor in any other.

Here in America I believe we'll have to wait until late spring or early summer to test the CA99/79 digital pianos and the Novus NV5 hybrid model, all of which are a part of Kawai's mid-priced line. In any event, for a certain segment of potential buyers who are interested in buying into Kawai for its sampled tones and feature set, choosing among pianos may now be more difficult than has been the case in the past.

Intermediate-level students who are taking lessons are, I believe, in many cases urged by teachers to practice and play on an acoustic instrument, so they can perform fluently in front of audiences on any piano. The last teacher I had would only instruct her students on a Yamaha NU1 in a back room at our local music store, and would wrinkle her nose at the thought of any student practicing on a "fake" piano. She glumly accepted that I used a Kawai CA65, but wasn't slow in trying to get me to buy an NU1 from the store. (Read into that whatever you want.) So what kind of Kawai piano should an aspiring student upgrade to if he's in the market to buy a new digital or hybrid piano in the mid-priced line? It seems to me that a person is left with a bewildering array of choices.

In my opinion the NV5 hybrid piano may well be the first mid-priced piano from Kawai that could effectively last for an entire decade. The downside is not only its price, but the apparent fact that it's using old samples from the CA98 days and a less-than-stellar interface. The CA99 has a new simulated grand action, resampled voices and a more sophisticated screen, but it's not an acoustic piano.

What makes everything even more complicated are long-term considerations. First, over the course of ten years the CA model will likely be upgraded at least once, and when we figure in the loss of money that entails we start to realize that if we had been in the above-mentioned group we might have been better off just buying the NV5 to begin with. Secondly, while a student might be impressed by the lighter action of the GFIII in the here-and-now, how might the lack of acoustic action affect his playing over the course of a decade?

And just to throw a final monkey wrench into the mess, we're left with the reality that the NV5 might well be the most attractive mid-range piano ever created, a showpiece that just oozes class. Then again, unless Kawai gives it a modern update on par with the CA99, it's already yesterday's news before it's ever sent to the colonies.

All of these facts need to be considered very carefully by any prospective buyer even before visiting a store that stocks all of the above pianos. And a student should plan on spending a very, very long weekend playing.

Without knowing any tech details you can CLEARLY hear that is not true.

Also, I paid good money for a pc that can load any VST, I don't want to pay a premium to allow my DP to do what I already can do.

By what classification do you rate these three pianos as Kawai's mid-priced line? Together with the probably soon-to-be-discontinued CS11 they are among the most expensive pianos Kawai has in their current lineup. Only the NV10 is more expensive.
I would say they are the high-priced models, with the CA48/58 and CN models being the mid-priced line.

Well you can lump the CA99/CS11 together with the Novus. So if the CA99 is a "high-priced line", then the Novus is a "higher-priced line"

I dont understand why the manufactures cant or will not put better sounds built in to their pianos . Why pay £8000 for a digital piano like a Kawai NV10 and then run a PC with Garritan CFX concert grand and seperate speakers because the NV10 piano sound is not good enough.
You can purchase Garritan for £150 with 133gb of piano sample and get a 500gb SSd drive for just £50.

When a new piano like the Kawai Ca99 comes out why cant we see the true specs of sample size.Probably be to embarrassing in comparison.

As none of these pianos have yet been released to the American market, I'm using estimates both from past sales figures of the CA line and European prices of the NV5, along with estimates of American dealer-discounted prices from posts in this forum. In that regard, I'm guessing that the dealer price for a PE version of the CA99 will be about $5,500 USD, while the dealer price for the NV5 will be anywhere from $6,500 to $7,000. If the price of the NV5 is any higher than that, then the NV10 might well be a tempting target for buyers, as I believe it can be purchased in the USA right now for less than $10,000.

To be sure, $7,000 is a lot of money to pay for a mid-range piano, hybrid or not. But I strongly believe that by 2021, when the initial sales rush for this new piano has subsided somewhat, a price of around $6,500 would be fairly common. We must remember that the NV5 is directly competing with Yamaha's NU1X for sales, and that piano has sold for a bargained price of less than $6,000. Feature-wise it's not the NV5's equal, but Kawai has always attempted to compete with Yamaha by offering more "bang for the buck." If the NV5 is priced too far above the NU1X, then sales could very well suffer, forcing the NV5 to adopt a more competitive sales strategy.

Ultimately, this brings me to a point that I made in my OP. If a student decides on the CA99, even by upgrading just once in the next ten years will his decision to stay with a digital grand action cost him as much money as he would have spent if he had bought the NV5 to begin with? If he's absolutely serious about improving his technique, and knows he will ultimately have to play acoustic pianos in his recitals, making a buying decision cannot be easy.

Wait.. the CA99 has better/newer samples than the NV5?

Sample size isn't everything. I and others here are of the opinion that Kawai's SK-EX Rendering compares favorably to available VSTs. Sound is naturally subjective, and you're always going to get a much greater selection using VSTs, so of course some people will prefer VSTs to a DP's built-in sound no matter how good it is.

Separate speakers also aren't required to use a VST so long as the DP has an audio input.


James addressed this:

Yes. As James wrote in the beginning of the thread:

- NEW: Authentic new electric piano, organ, harpsichord, strings, and bass sounds

I wonder who’s getting the NV5 for the authentic new electric piano, organ, harpsichord, bass, trumpet, trombone, sax, cowbell, guitar, banjo, and the entire Boston Symphony Orchestra?

And then you need a CPU, RAM, motherboard and audio interface that allows you to use it with low latency, and probably a better psu. And then you discover that the garritan samples are actually two different mics and three different perspectives, so the actual size is only +-20GB 'per sound'. And then you discover the modern internal sizes are obviously far beyond '4mb' and getting closer and closer each generation to the point many already prefer the build-up sounds over VSTs.

So you end up paying a premium for an ever decreasing improvement in sound. Meanwhile many people would not want to pay that, and most who do already have a pc so can do that themselves for far less money. So why make a DP €500-1000 more expensive only so some customers get an 'improvement' they could have bought themselves for a fraction of that?

Why would better sample sounds in a piano require a CPU? The piano already has that.
Why would it need RAM? The piano already has that.
Audio interface? It's already there.

The question is not "why won't they put a PC into a piano?"
It's "why won't they put better sounds into a piano?"

All good manufacturers collate feedback from multiple sources when planning and developing new products, and this is certainly the case for piano manufacturers such as Kawai.

User feedback from fellow PianoWorld members is undoubtedly useful, however it represents a relatively small proportion of the suggestions received from customers around the world, advice from Kawai's global network of dealers, distributors, and subsidiaries, and of course ideas conceived by Kawai's acoustic and digital piano R&D.

Kind regards,
James
x

I did not have a great deal of involvement in the CA99/CA79 owner's manual creation, however I gather that the contents will be updated (to reflect functions such as the "User" Virtual Technician parameters) in the near future.

Kind regards,
James
x

For the same reason you cannot run garritan CFX on a pc that could just run the grand2. Unless you think spec requirements have not increased the last 20 years, or assume that Kawai has vastly overpowered components yet refuses to use them, I am not sure what argument you are trying to make.