Kawai is careful not to claim that the PR-1 can equal the sound quality you’d get from, say, carefully positioned condenser mics and a 24-bit recorder. All the same, I found that the sound was exceptionally good. I would have no hesitation recommending the PR-1 to anyone with an acoustic piano who wants to record solos, whether for songwriter demos, a holiday album for friends, or an indie jazz solo release on a modest budget. Thanks to its line outputs, the PR-1 can also be used in sound reinforcement situations.
The PR-1 is not a multitrack recorder. It burns your performance directly to CD-R or CD-RW, but if you want to overdub or play along with existing tracks, you’ll need other equipment to play them back into your headphones while recording, and then you’ll need to import the PR-1’s CD tracks into your DAW software or standalone multitrack and manually align the piano recording with the rest of the mix. Nor is the PR really designed for recording ensembles. There are two 1/4" mic/line ins on the rear panel, with which you could conceivably mix a vocal mic, previously recorded backing tracks, or a live band with the piano while laying down your new piano part through the dedicated inputs for the included mics. These inputs can be panned and attenuated, and all get mixed to a stereo recording.
Setup was amazingly easy. Everything I needed was in the box, including a pair of Velcro straps with which I crawled under the piano and, following the diagrams in the manual, put one strap on a beam beneath the bass region of the soundboard and the other on a beam under the treble region. The special mics, which are box-shaped and smaller than a cigarette pack, have Velcro on one side to attach to the straps just by pressing them on. There’s nothing to screw in, and nothing to mar the piano.
The included multi-pin mic cables plug into the rear of the cube-shaped main unit. I dropped the complimentary CD-RW into the slot, adjusted my level using the rear-panel input trims, pressed the record button, and got a great-sounding take the very first time. The tone of the piano was captured with very high fidelity, the stereo image was pleasant, and the PR-1 handled dynamic range from very soft to very loud without distortion or audible compression.
Kawai warns that while the PR-1 burns standard audio CDs, they may not be playable in all CD players. When I used a CD-R, the disc played fine in my Denon CD player, but it took my computer to read a CD-RW onto which I had also recorded. Then again, the same is often true of CD-RWs burned on a computer, so this is not a fault of the PR-1 itself.
Other features of the PR-1 include built-in EQ and reverb, which it prints into recordings, and the ability to function as a standard CD player. The reverb sounds quite natural, but seemed to me like it was biased a bit toward the right speaker, as if the pianist were sitting in the normal concert grand orientation with the lid open and the audience to the right.
With the PR-1, Kawai has zeroed in on a definite need and fulfilled it expertly. It’s not cheap, but if your passion is more about Mozart than miking, this recorder won’t disappoint. There’s really nothing else on the market like it.