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Your willingness to tweak (and probably fix bugs) of the software is commendable, but I think it's a surreal situation: this is a job Kawai should have done already! Clients paid Kawai the cost of their piano and so this work is up to Kawai!

Customers shouldn't even have the thought of fixing something that came out of the factory faulty!

I agree, but what else can we do ??

We are in a position where Kawai leaves us in total silence (for over a year, now) about an update that will supposedly fix a lot of the issues we've raised (some apparently already "fixed internally" according to KJ, see this post)

I can only try to understand what makes Kawai so reluctant to either release a small update with some fixes or at the very least officially inform us of what will be in this big update they're apparently working on. To me, that means getting all the info I can about said update - source code, UI code included. If I can do nothing about it, so be it. I just want to understand.

Guessing why Kawai says nothing will take us nowhere, aside maybe from despairing the update will never come.
However I also think the longer they stay silent, the easier it is to think that there has been a huge screw-up somewhere. Leaving people guessing can only continue to harm their reputation...

I doubt there is a huge screw up. Much more likely is that they don't care, and think that they can get away with fixing bugs in the next model. We've seen from the quality of their code that they are not a software company, and we've seen from the deafening silence that they are not good in customer service (in my experience a lot of people who sell from dealers do that precisely because they don't want to have to deal with customers). I'd love to think that they are beavering away to fix our problems, but right now thinking they are sitting on their hands seems reasonable. They can't use their own products much or they would have discovered this stuff a year ago.

I wonder if they would pay more attention to a couple of Youtube videos ?

I really don't want to believe they don't care. Personally, I still believe they are not just sitting around and continue to trust James on this.
If he was willing to confirm some issues were fixed, state the per-key features of previous models would be added, share some beta versions of a firmware update (though not UI fixes) with users, and help so much on this thread, I still hope they have a good reason for why nothing has been released.

This does not make the company's radio silence acceptable in any way, but James' statements and contributions are the small light I'm clinging to for now.
I refuse to believe a person so devoted to helping their company's customers would lie on the matter, and only regret that Kawai not officially inform us of what's going on.

Bad PR if they admit to these issues now.
Bad PR. For not addressing and planning the longer term future over issues.
Bad PR. for being late and not engaging with a loyal customer base.
Worst PR above all else is leaving an Employee to field in areas that are obviously out of the remit then hanging both KJ and all customers out in the cold.
Pointless efforts for me trying to speak to Bonners (my dealer), they continue to fob me off and for a company of 6M sales here in the UK per year would have thought they would have some sway with Kawai.
My final Bad PR goes to Kawai obviously leaving the dealers to fend off an ever increasing disgruntled customer base.

If they leave all bugs with our generation as is and just release a new product, I doubt anyone will trust KAWAI DPs for a long time to come. If KAWAI screwed customers once, they'd probably do it again.
In their SK-EX brochure there is an entire page about the honour and the commitment of putting one's name onto a product. If they'd leave us without any bugfixes, I think Kawai-san would roll over in his grave, as this would be absolutely disgraceful.

I don't think KAWAI is such a company, though. Maybe they've rewritten parts, identified sleeper bugs (bugs that don't come to light only when another one is fixed or something new is added), added other locales and whatnot. KJ said that they are aware and that's the first step. I trust KJ that updates are coming...
Judging from the release schedule of the CA98 and CA99 a possible upper bound on the timeframe would be 04.22, so one year down, one to go. I like that they don't specify a date it's finished on as these dates are most often postponed anyways but I'd be great if there was a board where all the bugs and features are listed, if they're worked on, what release they're likely to be in... anything official really.

For me it's just about usable, not good or exciting but usable. It loads my favourite setting on boot up and I'm mostly over the 88 keys anyways. For me the boot is also not that significant, I open the DP, turn it on, prepare the music rest, put on my sheets and then it has booted already. It's OK. Could be faster, I'd appreciate improvements there but it's fine.

Maybe, yet I'd show that they are willing to change for the better. For me that's worth more than admitting that mistakes have been made. For me that's a sign of honour and pride.

We all have to consider one other possibility:

Kawai strongly believe that their product has NO issues, that warrant a major firmware and software release.

I don't know how strong or remote that possibility is. But it is a possibility. This is the one I chose to believe. In the psychological world, this stance from Kawai would be called denial.

You know, Yamaha ‘strongly believed’ that the loud note in the NU1/X was “totally normal”. They even went as far as stating this in the manual:

“This is normal, you idiots!”.........I’m quoting them verbatim.

A few years later they release a firmware fix for this ‘normal’ behavior and even then they didn’t admit any wrongdoing; not even an apology for calling us idiots.

No, Yamaha did not ‘pologize, and the change-log simply read, “improved playability”.

Don’t even get me started on the N1/2/3 and the “normal” crescendo effect. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard a piano play like a violin; that is unless you’re using the ‘piano’ to control a VST; of course, then the piano/controller can sound/play like anything; even a marimba!

Yamaha never even bothered ‘fixing’ the N1/2/3, and still to this day they’re charging big bucks for the N2!


The moral of the story: This is normal!

I can't say I find this likely given how many issues have been raised, and given they have started addressing them.

There are differences between:
- a feature that doesn't work as advertised
- a feature that doesn't work as expected
- a feature that doesn't work to the user's content
- a secondary feature that doesn't work
- a core feature that doesn't work

A manufacturer will often ignore all except the first and last cases.
We have examples of both here and it would be daft to argue what is core and what isn't.

I don't find it possible that Kawai is choosing to ignore this. The easiest and in fact only logical explanation is that they're really dependent on whoever wrote the UI, and whoever wrote the UI may be facing all manners of problems that have nothing to do with the program itself. Government interference, personal problems, you name it. At this point, however, Kawai should be able to assess whether the problems will be overcome or if they need to find another source for their software, not least because someone has to write the CA100/CA80 UI.

I don't like to quote James, generally, because he is not here in any official capacity. I personally don't take any of his comments or posts to mean anything coming from Kawai themselves. But I am drawing some subtle hints of Kawai's ignorance from some of his posts:

- He frequently mentions 'R&D' as looking into the issues. First off, I wouldn't consider these issues as issues for 'R&D'. These are issues that need to be handled by a 'Product Support Team.' R&D is for new product and new feature development. References to R&D tell me that Kawai don't consider them as issues.

- Next, he mentioned 'reproducible' a few times. Again, this may mean that Kawai is possibly not able to 'reproduce' the issues reported here. Also ties back to my point above - maybe Kawai think these 'issues' are features requested for by users.

Summing up the two, one can argue that Kawai don't believe that these are issues. Kawai believe that the CA79/CA99 are flagship products working flawlessly.

I just put one of my threads of my thought process above. I'd humbly accept if they're not true if Kawai can prove otherwise.

Lastly, I apologize to James for pulling his name here. I generally don't. I've never treated him as a Kawai official representative, and thus I never directed any of my comments or questions to him. Even here, I am just referencing him, for which I apologize.

I must have missed his comment, but certainly from the impression I have got, if Kawai followed James' example we wouldn't be having this conversation. I don't believe he would lie either, and I hope he understands that any criticism I have made is most certainly not directed at him. He has definitely stuck his head above the parapet for absolutely no benefit to himself personally, and I appreciate any help he can give us.

I find that so hard to believe - CEO's get fired for that sort of thing. Ratner's prawn sandwich comment has gone down in marketing lore as a lesson ! (for those not in the UK, Ratners was a jewelry store, now part I think of the Signet Group - he decided one day to be entirely honest and was quoted as saying that his company's products were total crap and lasted about as long as a Marks and Spencer's prawn sandwich). Despite pretty well everyone actually knowing this, especially the people that bought it, they didn't like having their faces rubbed in it, and the impact was pretty bad, forcing a rebrand).


Disclaimer - when I said I find that so hard to believe, I didn't mean I didn't believe you Pete, I meant something more along the lines of WTF ???

I re-read the issues in that letter (LINK) with more attention. Honestly I think that most of them are "tolerable", while some guys here talked about them like they were super-annoying at the point of selling the instrument...

IMHO, of that long list, I think the most annoying things are the following 2:

- backlight of the screen stays always on;
- missing per-key customization options.

For the other issues, from what I understand from that list, usually there is always a workaround, while other issues are mostly cosmetic ones.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending Kawai, there are definitely some issues with the UI of the CA79/99 and I think they should be fixed ASAP (and I hope they will) rather than just focusing on the developing of the next series of digital pianos.

But selling (or not buying) the instrument just for these UI issues? Honestly, I don't know... If you like the feel of the GF3 wooden action and you like the piano sound these DPs generate, I think you can live with those small flaws... But at the same time I would be really mad if Kawai decided TO NEVER FIX them because "that is how the UI works by design"...

Another possibility for this long wait for an update is that Kawai disagrees with the external company about the responsability of the UI issues. Let's assume Kawai told the external company to fix the issues because is their responsability to fix bugs in the UI. But the external company doesn't want to fix them (without being paid) because they think they've been adhering to the specifications Kawai wanted, so from their point of view they are not implementation bugs, but "design" bugs. And design bugs are responsability of the specification designers (Kawai). That's another reason why I think it's very risky to outsource software developing of important parts of your custom devices...

If true, they most certainly are not eating their own dog food. None of the issues we have raised are hard to reproduce, which means they just are not using their products. I'd like to think that at a piano makers company their employees would like to buy and own their products, not just be paid to test them. To be honest, none of this makes any sense - you don't develop an action like the GF3 without a real love, and yet you end up with crappy software ??

I have come to believe that there is an issue with the firmware for the SKEX rendering on the CA79. As I posted above, I thought the issue with the shrill noise was fixed, but later recanted because the issue returned. I started up my piano today and heard the shrill noise with the first sound settings that the DP always starts up with, but when it loaded to the SK-EX Classic rendering (my default loading) the shrill noise was gone! This makes absolutely no sense, and because it is intermittent I have to believe the firmware has issues. Here are the recordings with the exact same SK-EX Classic settings - 1 from today and one from 10 days ago. Here is the WeTransfer link: Shrill and No Shrill.

I just had a quick look at the Kawaii ES920 user manual. I believe it was released late last year.

It shows that you can rename and delete individual files, use uppercase characters in the name, record while in Four Hands mode, and has per key adjustments of voicing, tuning, and volume.

It has many buttons and a small LCD screen, but not a touch screen interface. Elsewhere I believe I heard that it uses the same virtual technician smartphone app as the CA79/99.

I believe it was already clarified here that "shrill" is just an added resonance modeled by the SK-EX Rendering Engine to give you a more realistic experience. On a real acoustic piano you'll hear that and many other shrills! If you don't like it, I think there is an option to lower its volume or deactivate it completely...

Are you sure that’s what you want?

If Kawai starts paying attention to all these petty issues they won’t be able to focus all their attention on ‘developing the next series of digital piano(s)’; namely the NV-20!

Do you want them to drop the ball on the NV-20 simply because some guys ‘round here can’t wait a few months for a screen that goes fully black, is that what you want?

I want Kawai to continue dedicating 100% of their resources to the NV-20 digital hybrid piano series; if not, and Kawai is distracted by all these complaints, we risk the NV-20 turning out to be a lemon because, you know, Timmy wanted a perfect CA99, now!

So I ask, can we pull together for the NV-20 and just be patient about the shrill, the woosh, the buzz, the thud, the squeak, and the clickety-clack?

You will get your perfect UI and zero-buzz CA99 after the NV-20 is released; heck, I’ll even join you in complaining about the screen that doesn’t go black, but once again, let’s work together on this and be patient for the betterment of the community!