| From USENET, a review from an XD-5 owner.
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From: [email protected] (David Elliott)
Subject: Kawai XD-5 technical overview
Date: 11 Jan 91 16:29:23 GMT
The XD-5 is Kawai's new "percussion synthesizer". It isn't a drum
machine, in that it doesn't have a sequencer, and it's not just a
sample player, as you can really do a lot more with it. At a list
price of $895 (I paid $675 for mine), I suspect it's a little out of
the range of most home studios, but it's worth knowing about.
The XD-5 is a 2U rackmount unit with an external power supply. It's
extremely light, leading me to believe that it could fit in a 1U case,
but I want to believe that they chose the larger case so that the
front-panel programming interface would be better (and it is a nice
interface). The front panel has two sliders (volume and data), lots of
buttons, a headphone jack, a card slot, a 2x16 green backlit LCD, and
is in standard Kawai gray. The rear panel has MIDI IN/OUT/THRU jacks,
2 stereo outputs, and 6 mono outputs.
The software is divided into 3 parts: kits, singles, and outputs.
There are 16 kits, accessible from the front panel or through program
changes. Each kit has an overall volume, an output patch number, and
88 sound slots, corresponding to the keys on an 88-key controller.
Each slot consists of a single patch, pitch parameters (note and cent),
volume, and output submix channel. While editing the slot parameters,
the slot number is controllable via a MIDI keyboard. This means that
you can jump from slot to slot directly to make comparisons. I found
this useful when I was programming stereo sets of ride cymbals.
There are 64 singles, again accessible from the front panel or through
program changes. I won't list all of the parameters here, but singles
are made by mixing samples. There are 256 16-bit samples made at
44.1kHz (more about these later). A single can consist of 1-4 samples
mixed together, with amplitude modulation between pairs. Each sample
has separate velocity scaling, auto-bend, and amplitude envelope. Two
low-pass filters, with velocity scaling and envelope, may be used on
pairs, or in series on all 4 samples. The result is a virtually
endless pallette of sounds.
The set of samples is pretty large and diverse. Where it makes sense,
samples are looped, though some of the loops "pump", supposedly due to
the rapid decay of the original sound. There is a set of cyclic
waveforms, such as sine, pulse, sawtooth, bass, bell, piano, and
organ. There are 3 sets of "percussion" samples, sampled normally,
reversed, and bright. Other samples include "reverse head" and "short
head" sounds ("head" seems to imply the attack/decay portion of the
sample), "omnibus" (strange but useful samples), and random noise.
There are 16 output patches. Each patch consists of 8 submix channels,
designated A-H. A submix channel may be set either to a place (-7 to
+7) in the stereo field of the stereo outputs, or to one of the 6
individual outputs. This allows grouping of sounds for effects
devices. Personally, I would have preferred effects loop routing
instead, but it isn't a major problem.
The user interface is well above average for front-panel programming.
Small sets of related parameters are grouped under buttons, and the
same button that gets you into the group cycles through it, so you
aren't moving around a lot. Data entry is performed either by a pair
of +/- buttons, or by a value slider, and there are copy functions in
kits, singles, and outputs. I found it quite easy to design my own kit
to get started, and it took only a few minutes to design a new crash
cymbal single. My one complaint is that it's too easy to get out of
edit mode without writing the data (I may have missed a way of getting
back to the edit buffer, though).
The manual set is typical of Kawai, which is to say that all the
information is there, but you aren't given any extra insight into why a
feature exists or how to do special things. Some overpriced third
party book will probably be available to help novices (hmm, maybe I
should write it...).
The factory defaults are also typical of Kawai, which is to say that
they are fine, but they aren't as good as they could be. If you buy an
XD-5 and never program it or get new patches for it, it's a little
overpriced. We'll see how Kawai decides to handle new patches.
Overall, I'm quite pleased with the XD-5. It's the machine I was
looking for, and with some programming, I think it will be useful for a
long time.
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