And yes, sure, I have to push the volume very, very high if I want to get the same level as my real piano, even with the lid closed! I had to play a few performances for two pianos with a friend pianist, so when we rehearsed at home, the comparison was obvious !

Hello Luc,

Thank you for confirming, first hand, exactly how much clean power is needed in order to simulate an accurate piano sound.

Cheers,

Joe

Would adding some reverb (using Pianoteq's reverb) help the situation, with "near-field" speakers?

Thanks --

.    Charles (usually with headphones, occasionally with an ElectroVoice ZXA1 aimed at my head)

PS Gilles, noting the "stopper bar" you put behind the pedal and in front of the rear legs of the stand -- I have the same piano stand (love it!  very stable and compact when folded) and have been wondering how to deal with "pedal migration"

Yes, I had posted pictures of my stand when I added the MIDI solution controller with the FC3 pedal, somewhere in 2009, but the direct links are dead now. Here is a new link to these three pictures:

https://picasaweb.google.com/1039962729...directlink

This solution works very well, at least better than duct tape...

Looks like some good new contributions to this thread  

My own update:  I've had some success using both headphones (AKG K240) and the studio monitors (see above) *at the same time* whenever possible.  That said, it's nice to have headphones when the graciousness of family wears thin!

cheers,

ethan

PS Gilles, noting the "stopper bar" you put behind the pedal and in front of the rear legs of the stand -- I have the same piano stand (love it!  very stable and compact when folded) and have been wondering how to deal with "pedal migration"

Thank you for mentioning my name in the context of this thread. 

Yes, in the past, I did describe my audio system for Pianoteq; however, for practice, I use AKG-702 headphones (the studio version of AKG-701's, with a detachable cord instead of a hardwired cord).  The reason for using headphones instead of the full-blown audio system is that my wife of nearly 37 years has heard me practicing wayyyy too much, especially when learning a new piece or trying out various phrases for existing pieces.  Quite frankly, she is tired of the noisy racket I make at all hours of the day and night.

My audio system is rather large as compared against computer-type workstations.  The reason is that every three decibels' increase requires a doubling of amplifier power.  Want an additional 3db on top of that?  No problem; except you need to re-double the previous amplifier requirement.  An increase in 10dB requires approximately a ten-fold increase in amplifier output.  A 20dB increase requires a hundred-fold increase in amp output.  +30db requires 1000 times more amplifier power; +40db requires 10,000 times more amplifier power.

Get it?  A +10dB loudness increase requires a 1 with only one zero (i.e. 10-fold) power increase; 
A +20dB loudness increase requires a 100-fold power increase; 
A +50db loudness requires a 100,000-fold power increase.

You get the idea.

Granted, when playing softly, your amplifier puts out only 1/16th of a watt, or even less;  please understand that  reproducing a +40 or +50dB increase in a grand piano's loudness requires thousands of clean audio watts!  This is why Pianoteq has a built-in limiter, and this is why recording companies use (or over-use, in my opinion) compressors when mastering a song.  It is my opinion that this fact governs why almost every commercial digital piano literally "craps out", or at least their highs disappear or distort, and their bass notes lack that "oomph" that is otherwise present in a good grand piano's performance!!!  (My condolences to all of the customers who believed the digital keyboard salesmen's pitches that 'This piano sounds just like the real thing!')

My home setup has three stereo power amps:  A Bryston 4B rated at 250 watts per channel into 8 ohms, plus a Bose 1801 (originally designed in the 1970s as an amp to power their then-famous 901 speakers) rated at 400 watts per channel into 8 ohms, and finally a modified Carver 1.5T amp that can borrow power from the other channel such that the total is a whopping 1200 watts!  It takes over 2 kilowatts of clean amplifier power to reproduce the true dynamic range of a piano!

What happens when one does not have 2+ kilowatts' worth of clean amplifier power?  Usually the amps have some form of soft-clipping circuits -- which really amounts to distortion.  Most speakers will be fried with that much raw amplifier power.  That's why my personal system consists of a pair of ancient Ohm-F full range speakers (power hungry in themselves), plus a "smaller" (but still huge) pair of Ohm Walsh 4's, plus a pair of B&W speakers whose model I don't recall at the moment.

......

And then, as Gilles accurately pointed out, you need a musician who is able to make music with the software at hand....

Cheers,

Joe

..., but then the high frequencies will be inevitably damaged. Law of physics. ...

I placed the speakers upside down with the tweeter at the bottom, shooting straight into my ears, but still, I agree it is far from optimal...

By the way, these speakers in the picture are ancient (but good) Dynaco bookshelfs, and not the higher quality Paradigm I used previously. Speaker quality doesn't convincingly improve the realism at low to moderate volume in my opinion.

Here is a link to a picture of the right speaker on the stand:

https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/k...directlink

To me, as somebody playing only for himself, the best results are with Bose noise cancelling headphones. No keyboard or pedal noise, no room interaction, just the pure sound of the model. Somebody doing gigs or playing for people is of course in a whole different situation.

I recall Joe Felice once wrote about his home setup using large high quality speakers along with powerful amplification. This must sound pretty good indeed because Joe has such a stellar technique! The other point I would like to make is that sometimes a piano in the room is only possible if a good pianist is also there! Not my case...

What makes me think this way is a recent experience during a choir sectional rehearsal in a very bad sounding conference room. At one point our accompanist, a professional organist, came along and played the complex piano reduction of the piece we were learning on a very cheap Yamaha keyboard, with plastic keys and a synthesizer spring action. Well, the result was extraordinay, there was a piano in the room suddenly, because there was also an excellent pianist. The fact he was used to pipe organ touch surely helps in dealing with this bad action, but he also sounds fabulous on our regular real upright...

If I direct them towards me, to form the famous triangle, and with a "player" preset the sound is very clear, but maybe too clear : al the presence and the "illusion" of playing a grand vanishes immediately.

I'm trying to achieve what someone called more "presence", and in order to do so I'm trying to direct the speakers towards the wall, at 10-15 cm from it, an use an "under lid" preset, on the ground that, after all, that's (very grossly) how an upright soundboard works.

Does it make any sense ? Am I the only fool around here to try this solution ?

PS: never tried it so not sure it will work

Just to explain, ambiophonics is only practical for the player, because you have to position two speakers close together and sit right in the middle to get the effect. Also, they have to be quite far away so as to keep a 10 to 20 degree angle between the center of the speakers and you. If you play for other people or accompany somebody, it is not useful. I experimented with it because I play mostly for myself and tried to emulate the sound of headphones. One way I did this with pianoteq is to use the ambiophonics plugin along with pianoteq in Cubase. It was not satisfactory, but I still like a lot the plugin for listening to recorded music through Winamp. The effect varies from recording to recording, but sometimes you really get a full stage both wide and deep which makes you forget there are speakers involved. This is the 3D effect I was trying to get with pianoteq.

The reason it doesn't work in my opinion is that the sound output of pianoteq doesn't include any room or stage contribution which could benefit from ambiophonics (for good reasons actually). Reverb can help but it has no out of phase component which could bring depth to the sound. I experimented also with a much better external reverb (not convolution based though) but found no improvement over headphones.

You are probably right in wanting your speakers to be higher up because tweeter dispersion is usually bad coming from the top of the speakers because of interference with the edge of the box. This is the case for my speakers anyway, and my stands being not height adjustable, they are too low if I put them near the keyboard and sit in a correct height to play. But I would not rule out also trying the tilted base because this might also correct the dispersion problem if you keep them low on the ground. This might even be closer to the effect of built-in speakers, the sound coming from the ground up in a similar way. You may want to try this with a different arrangement of temporary support...

If I understand sigasa correctly, he is using a single powerful horn-loaded active PA speaker, which might also work better than a weaker stereo pair in some cases, in part by probably having much higher efficiency and so playing a lot louder and closer to the sound output of a real piano.

Hope this helps...

i understand the general concept of "ambiophonics" but how is it practical?  how do you implement it?

my piano has no built-in speakers -- it is just the keyboard and requires external speakers in order to work.  i feed it through a small mixing board to give me more control over the sound.

also, for better or worse, this is the hardware that i have available, and i don't currently have the budget to purchase a new sound system.  so i need to make what i have work the best it can for me.

the more i play with my position in relation to the speakers, the more it seems that the speakers just need to be higher off the ground, because when i move my head down closer to where they are it sounds great

http://uk.yamaha.com/en/products/link/106448