It's been a week playing on the Numa X GT and here are some impressions in case they help other users:
I'm a non professional trained pianist looking for the "perfect" controller, tried almost every action in the market and wanted to try the TP400W which has been raved quite much about.
The action falls on the heavy side, I like it and to me it somewhat ressembles the PHA4, the TP400W felt very close although more accurate and agile than the PHA4 but still sluggish and I'll explain why.
The travel when you press the key down is excellent, very realistic IMO and consistent across the whole keyboard, the return on the other hand is the big "issue" for me, nothing wrong if playing some "ABBA" or "Fly me to the moon" but when it comes to classical music, you cannot perform quick trills the way you'd do on an accoustic, freely and expressively, because if you're quicker than what the keys allow, you'll clearly feel the hammer underneath your fingers returning to its initial position and you've hit it already again before that happening and the result here is missing notes.
In other words, you need to lift your fingers all the way up before hitting the key again (repetitions), otherwise your fingers are quicker than the action since there's no real "let-off" like in the accoustics and you'll get no sound unless you change your technique as I did, hitting the keys stronger while returning so I could effectively activate the sensors and produce sound, it worked out well after a lot of trying but the trills became lifeless and uncontrolable, just a forced ornament that sounds mostly loud because of what I explained before.
Controlling trills or any type of ornaments in that context becomes a tricky matter, you can get some better results after adjusting a lot to that action but still not satisfying enough so you can say this is the ultimate action, unfortunately.
Fast passages weren't a problem, although they'll take a bit more of effort because of the heavy action if you're used to some lighter/agile ones, still some keys might not be as responsive as you'd expect because you haven't used enough force down, meaning you need to ensure that the key has traveled down enough so that you've triggered the sensor, soft staccatos in that sense are impossible.
Another thing that bugs me a bit is that the black keys felt slightly heavier than the whites to me, that can be improved with an internal setting that allows you to adjust the balance between whites and blacks, that very cool IMO and helps a bit to get the same feel between them, other people may not feel any difference though.
Last thing I'd like to mention regarding action is the pivot length which is 21.7cm (white keys) according to SL, in my case, I can say I do notice an important difference in the touch of the key back to front, meaning that the keys (especially the blacks) become quite uncontrollable in their second half towards the fallboard, not that they're completely unplayable but it takes bigger effort to control them, that's more evident when playing arpeggios that require pressing some blacks quite at the back, you need to press stronger on them which is again somewhat tricky and undesirable for me.
Some folks will say, any key behaves like that because of the momentum and inertia etc. While it's true that less effort is generally required when playing towards the key tip (basic physics), the difference between that and the second half of the key shouldn't be that noticeable if the key stick (pivot length) is long enough. An example of that is the GF2 (24cm) I still play, I've compared the actions side by side and those "issues" weren't present in the GF2, I could play the key at any point without really changing the force I used for that. Not sure it's all just about the pivot length or perhaps the design of the key has something to do too.
This all becomes yet worse if using internal sounds (very few layers IMO), forgot to mention that I'm using it as a controller mostly with Pianoteq and Noir. I must say it really makes a nice MIDI controller, you get full dynamic range (0-127) and no velocity adjustments needed in my case.
Back to the sounds, I've updated the system and added all available new piano sounds, I found them generally intimate, nice with headphones, less so with external monitors, they lack longer decays and more layers IMO, also I was missing some more ompf depending on the piece/mood, some more bite if you want. The "american" and the "japanese" are my favourites, the "german" is too mild but I like it too, the "italian" is a complete disappointment, I was really expecting nice samples but it wasn't the case, similarly although in a less degree the "viennese", this all is very subjective of course and it's just my taste.
When switching between onboard pianos and the VST it's like day and night, not that I didn't like the internal sounds but I think SL still can do a better job, especially by adding more parameters so you can a closer sound to your liking, they're now 4 parameters per sound (one of them is the volume of the pedal sound..) but they're planning to expand them in the future according to a quick feedback from SL on youtube, I guess that will increase the size of the downloaded pianos which will result in some capacity limitation of the internal memory which is 50% by now after downloading all available packs (including non-pianos), not sure how much is that in GB.
On a positive note, the programed patches that come by default are very fun to play, you can spend hours trying this and that. I like a lot the user interface, very intuitive and accessible, most parameters are editable by a single click. There's also a MIDI button that's heaven for VST users since it turns the whole slab into a MIDI controller purely.
Also, the EQ which is accesible with a dedicated button is very useful and it comes handy when playing VST through the internal USB interface since it also affects the sound of the played VST, you can very quicky change the value of the MID frequency as well as the level of all 3 frequencies, you cannot select the values of the low and high frequencies though.
There are 3 velocities and there's a useful parameter that allows to change the sensibility up/down to 25%, not sure what that exactly is but seemed to me some sort of fine tuning the velocity, like giving it some light curve.
The build quality is good, feels solid and sturdy, the wood pannels on the sides are very cool and the buttons/knobs behave properly.
The thing is heavy but one average person can manage to place it on a stand at home/stage.
Sound interface is usable, not the greatest ever but enough to run some Pianoteq without significant latency, also been able to run ableton on it for backing tracks.
The pedal unit feels quite cheap in comparison with pedals on my CA97 and even compared to the damper pedal from Roland (cannot recall its name), my pedal unit was faulty since the damper wasn't working at all, a minot issue though.
Last and not least, not sure it's something inherent to my XGT only but it started to develop some click noise on some keys, it wasn't there at the beginning and I'm surprised how quickly some keys started to get like that, I've played classical music mostly these last days, so not sure this action can really live up to some heavy duty usage.
Good news is that I still can return it so I'll do and I'll get an FP90X instead, I was wishing for better contenders but there's nothing appealling rather than the "outdated" VPC1/MP11SE and the FP90X, well the P515 may be an option too, but that's another story.
Hope it helps future users who are blindly buying the XGT as I did, good luck in any case and happy playing!
Regards,
David
Last edited by davidizquierdo82 (04-01-2023 13:57)
P85>Kawai CA97>Numa XGT>FP90X>LX706
Pianoteq 8 Pro (all instruments) + Organteq 2
i7 4790K W11 64bits + UMC1820 + MTM + DT770 pro X
http://youtube.com/DavidIzquierdoAzzouz
