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Hi

Does anyone have any experience - or better still samples they could share - of the recording quality achievable on a Kawai model that has built in USB to device recording? I’m looking in particular at the CN29. How many “bit” does it record at? Is there any unwanted hum/hiss etc? Any input appreciated. Thanks.

Please note that the CN29 does not feature a USB to Device port, and therefore does not support recording audio to USB. This feature is available on the CN39 and CA59 and higher models, along with the ES8, MP7SE, and MP11SE slab-type instruments.

Kawai DPs that support this feature allow audio to be recorded in either WAV and MP3 format. The recording specifications are shown in the table below:



Please note that some models use a 192kbit/s bitrate for MP3 encoding. Please refer to the instrument's owner's manual to confirm this point.

The recording is full digital, so no hum or hiss is audible (apart from the natural noise that may be present in the original samples). However, you may find that the audio level is a little - this is intentional, in order to prevent clipping. When I use the USB audio recorder, I typically normalise the levels to a fixed level using audio editing software.

Kind regards,
James
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Digital recordings are not noise-free. Floating point round-off errors in digital mixers and other DSP algorithms create digital noise.

Just recording digital with fix point number create a noise. Lets say you have a CD quality ADC which only output natural number between 0 and 65535. If a sample is 35.478 the ADC will output 35. You will have a -0.478 noise signal.

Floating point will not add more noise if mantissa is longer than the fix point number. Then a 32 bits floating point will be comparable to a 24bits integer. It will be even better if the amplitude is low. (However, a 24bits resolution will induce a SNR far lower than the analog circuit noise).

However if the quantisation of the ADC add noise, we can the transfer or record the samples without adding noise. With a DP, there are no ADC since samples are already stored in a digital format. We may have a little rounding noise if the volume setting or the key velocity alter the samples which are outputted. But it will be surely less noisy than a DAC conversion and then a ADC conversion.

Theoretically, the all digital recording will be less noisy. But it depends on the digital implementation and how much DSP is taking place. I have seen it go both ways in practice.

Dithering intenionally introduces random noise to attain other benefits. Some analog noise may actually turn out to behave as a form of self-dithering (eg tape hiss back in the days of analog multi-track tape.

Sure, but the OP's question was:


The digital recording produced by the instrument is of high quality, and will likely sound "noise free" for the vast majority of listeners.

Kind regards,
James
x