Pianoteq 5 impressions (Page 5 of 7)

interesting video

Maybe because we don't play so loud?

Really? You Never Play ff with the Blüthner ?

Pianoteq sounded really good. Ivory sounds good, with just a little bit more organic/wood sound for the bass. But pianoteq sounds more alive and it's fully customized in details. In other words, pianoteq if we see as a whole, it's cleary superior.

But !!!   I propose to let Modartt find their best setting, including mics types and position, alow they to try their "best shot" and use their FXP in a new comparison.

What about this idea?

All decent sampled pianos are recorded in anechoic chambers (chamber designed to eliminate any reverberation of environment).
But your argument it's valid if we would compared pianoteq to a real piano recorded in a living room, where even the forniture and ground/carpet would alter the sound a bit.

I can almost see people asking modartt to add settings for furniture, carpet type etc.  Háaa háaa háaaa...

Anyway we could ask Modartt to try their best shot, try find the best setting, best mic types and mic position, to try match the ivory recorded as close as possible.

Hmmm, sounds nice, but seems like the guy really needs to adjust his velocity curve somewhat. Some notes are really sticking out like a sore thumb.

http://soundcloud.com/ben-crosland/etude

Nothing fancy, but maybe of interest as it's recorded with the Blüthner model in Pianoteq5 STAGE. From a collection of easy piano pieces I've been working on.

VSL piano was taken in anechoic chamber, at least.

Hm, alright. I thought the Silent Stage was anechoic. I mean it was purposedly built to record the cleanest possible samples without any early reflections etc.

Makes no sense to piano sampler/DP developer to record a grand piano in a environment with reverberation (non anechoic) if the software/DP will use convolution reverb or similar, cause otherwise people would always get a reverb effect layered over a original reverb recording.

Recording in a anechoic chambre it's much more often than you imagine.

Simply put, this puts Pianoteq in exactly the state I'd been hoping from the beginning. The fidelity is now there to go with the depth of velocity/tone response. There "is" a very good Upright extension. A lineup of Models that don't seem like they were just tweaked from one as fodder. Im very happy and excited to use Pteq 5 and seeing what they do from here. Anything else they do is "perfecting" at this point. If I could make one suggestion it would be to start adding even more body (Piano is a very rich sound) Pianoteq had great body but it's still a little ways from what you feel when you sit in front of an acoustic. That said nobody else is closer and this is the best release IMO (to my ears) that I've heard from a piano soft synth  EVER

Is it just me or the extreme lower notes are more muffled than in v4.5 on almost all piano models..... anyone else think so?

This sounds absolutely fantastic and really well played! Is there an fxp file for this?

new version of Mozart Sonata, with new velocity curve.

The master keyboard is a poor Casio PX-330, not easy to have good precision, but Pianoteq sound good and better than Casio.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPtYa6o4xoU

You sound kinda bitter.... the Casio PX-330 is an old and mediocre digital piano with only two sensors and a sub-par controller.... so yeah....he's right.

Wrong.  The Casio Px- 350 is a three sensor board.

Bill

ha, strange coincidence, i just spent the last day or 2 trying to learn this piece

nice playing, at least much better than me... !!

Yes, only two sensors....so the keys have to completely rise before they can be played again. Three sensors are necessary to get the most out of pianoteq. (Also the newer casio's support HD midi....so that's pretty nice as well)

thanks.

D4 POINTILLIST with a little more REVERB (more mix)

Olivier

Well, now you're gonna have to get started on it so I can learn something. I don't know much about HD midi...what's your beef?

Not sure why I thought the tri sensor keybed was new in the PX-x50 series , I did reference the low quality of the 330's keybed in an earlier post though....

That's great; thanks Guillaume.

Additionally it would be fine if users who just read here, or demo pianoteq, would write their impressions too right here!
I found out, while I was learning a lot from "no clue" to what the sound is (maybe) made of, that this approach changes very much how you listen (and play, in my case, sadly enough, I decreased a real lot while asking myself what makes the low notes sound so and so and so on^^, Easy to get lost in details.).
While it is extremely important to take care of the slightest detail of details to build an instrument, of course, it is sometimes a totally different impression one gets that way - compared to maybe 90% of piano players and users.

I showed pt4-5 to about 25 people who formerly had only sampled pianos or real ones. It might actually be interesting even for sales figures how people usually decide if they like an instrument. 24 out of 25 played a while, and then said "yes" or "no" . And it should be possible to say "no", even if some happy long time pt-users, me included, would find it "strange" if one does not agree to all the professionals and most detailed description-tellers say. (Well, it is possible, just that those saying no tend not to express it if they find the tone is, to overdo it slightly^^, similar to some religion-group.)

About 50% had their yes or nos and that was it. The rest splitted into "the bass in sampled piano XYZ is better" or "wow, those overtones in the fortepianos are truly outstanding, WHAT is it?".

To cut it short, maybe for the developers it would be even better if more people would speak up here, like blackandwhite87 did, for example.
Sometimes it's good to get alternative views, and I somehow miss the "90%" here I spoke about. As important as the "10%" are, it can be deceiving? I'm writing this because I think too many users are just silent here because of the "professional tone". No harm intended, just a "hey, speak up", more views would be good. These pianos have the power to attract many more people, I think...

Hi, the reason for wanting to update was manyfold.

My PC (WIN7) was never stable; I did want the flexibility to output to more than one pair of boxes to experiment with; my sound system was generally flawed, it happened probably due to a confict between some 32bit and 64bit installed drivers. (Resulting in degraded sound quality within Pianoteq standalone, which became markedly better when using a DAW like Reaper.)

And I did want to get an answer to the basic question: how the audio quality of the used components and built in effects was a limiting factor responsible for  the shortcomings of PTQ4.5 were to be attributed to. (It was mainly the poor attack which sounded too artificial, synthetic ).

Pianoteq 5 and the PRO version with the 192bit internal proceeding engine performance option brought the answer: it's components are flawless and of excellent quality, even with the old EMU0404.

I have with Windows 7 and WIN8.1 no extra stability problems with this sound card, but the drivers are legacy ones and for home use only, one shouldn't use it in a live performance.
   
By the way the ASUS Xonar Essence One has now and upgrade (mkII) which I am tempted to try out as a real replacement for this old EMU. (The RME goes then to my son.)

EDIT #2: The most important thing I forgot to mention why I need a replacement gear: the EMU is broken after some 5-6 Years of heavy usage, the attenuation knob of the EMU has got losen, so noisy that it is practically unusable (without damage to the  speakers.) It can be used only as the default audio equipment with the built-in windows volume control.

Asio4ALL has it's own limitation, beside of the inferior sound incomparison to the factory driver.

EDIT: I Just tried it for fresh comparison to formulate it in an authetentic way: yes ASIO4ALL is useable, it is ways better with a decent audio interface (+ speaker) than most built in audio in PCs. Nonetheless, the clear edge has the native driver over ASIO4ALL, very audibly.