[ Closed ] New ultra-realistic demo recordings with Pianoteq Steinway B! (Page 1 of 2)

Gorgeous sound. Much enjoyed. I will attempt to emulate in my own classical recordings.

The volume sounds a bit low (haven't bothered connecting a headphone amp yet), it has a rather narrow stereo image, and also sounds rather distant. This may be exactly the kind of sound you wanted, but FWIW, it's not the kind of sound I like. Here's an example of a sound I think IS excellent:
https://youtu.be/4-6JVJ1oXRM

Greg

We share a lot of our work on Modelling Audio Expert website, but indeed, our cooking secrets remain in the kitchen for the moment.

In fact, the realism techniques we have created are specific to recording with Pianoteq, and we offer recording services from MIDI files for our customers.

SEE RATES AND AUDIO EXCERPTS HERE: http://modelling-audio-prod.com/recordi...idi-files/

Cheers

Michael

If it helps you, we normalized the volume of Clair De Lune at -18 LUFS. That's what we wanted.
To give you an example of a comparison, Menahem Pressler's last recording (Deutsche Grammophon, 2018) is at -19.5 LUFS for the same piece. That is to say, a little less loud than our version.

The volume of normalization is always a matter of choice, as is the stereo width and reverberation level.

Hi Greg

Don’t rely on the Apple Music Preview’s volume. There is at least 1 dB more than on the original CD recording, maybe even more.
You can also notice this volume difference between Apple Music Preview and iTunes Store.

The close miking can also give the impression that the volume is louder at certain passages.
Moreover, the dynamic range is larger on our recording. This is a demo recording, so we voluntarily didn’t made volume automation to enhance the overall volume, as we would have done for a commercial recording.

Normalization is a simple and complex subject at the same time, but it is interesting to discuss it.

Yes, absolutely. We can reproduce all recording types. We already have a lot of projects going on with this type of sound.

The sound on Mr. Pressler's last  recording is fantastic. I much prefer piano recordings that let you hear every detail of the performance. Another example is Alice Sara Ott's "Nightfall" (also with some Debussy and also on DGG!). The piano sound is extraordinary: warm, present, detailed but also with some ambience. It's just IMHO, but I don't like cavernous, distant, highly reverberated piano sound.

well, well, well...I said IMHO, right? It is just that, my opinion, my preference. And I don't think that when I hear Pressler's recording, my head is in the soundboard!

I go to piano concerts a lot, and in many different venues, large and small.  Many times, even with good seats, it is difficult to hear many of the details in the playing.
And before you ask, yes my hearing is good (I had an audiogram done not so long ago). So, as far as piano recordings are concerned, I don't see the point of giving the listener a perfect simulation..,. of a purely distant listening experience, where too much detail is inaudible. Through multiple microphones, closer and farther, you can get a good compromise between clarity and ambience, and that's what a lot of modern piano recordings show. I, again it is very personal, do not care if a recording is "absolutely realistic", as long as it brings the music to me in all its glory.

Hi Michael,

Theses demos sound great and yes they sound as you can hear in some classical recordings.

Now, as a player that only plays at home (I am not a professional musician), I woud like to ask you 2 questions:

- Did you do some note per note changes (unisons, tunings...) to achieve these presets, or only ambience and mics changes?
- Do you consider to make some "player" or "headphone" presets?

Thanks,

SK

Thanks stamkorg for your appreciations and the points you raise.

Regarding the Thiollier’s recording, our goal was to get about the same type of miking, but we did not try to do exactly the same thing. The recordings we present here are just simple '' demo '' recordings.

Thiollier's piano - undoubtedly a Steinway D - is much wider and rounder than Model B. It's really very different.

If I understand correctly, you may be talking about the depth of the concert hall ... We placed the microphones and set different parameters so that the high notes resonate. This can be heard a lot in ‘‘Golliwogg's cake walk’’ (0'28 to 0'32, etc.).
Depending on the type of concert hall you choose and where you place the mics, the effect will be more or less audible.
That said, each hall creates its own problems, but here, this is the effect we wanted.

In fact, the more the microphones are away from the piano, the less you'll hear the attack, which is normal. Thiollier’s recording has a sound a little closer than ours ...

The compression setting we used also tends to smooth the transients. We wanted to control a bit the excessive dynamics of some passages, but without overwriting the sound. So we had to make a compromise to make the compressor as discreet as possible.

I'm not sure that the Pianoteq model has a bass problem, especially since the original model was selected by Martha Argerich herself. I think modeling is very faithful. However, this may be due to the room itself (here, a small conservatory room) and the microphones placement. I think we'd just have to put a mic in the piano tail to fix that.

You are quite right. There is still a lot of work, but I think we can trust the Modartt’s team to make things happen very quickly.

Thanks again for your message!

Michael

Is this the FJ Thiollier recording which you are referring to? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nft7tiy5E-w
If so, FWIW,  to me, that still sounds like the piano is mic'd appreciably closer, despite the large amount of ambience.  (and I prefer it)

Greg.

Firstly, 1.4dB isn't very much at all. (1dB is the smallest change that a human can detect reliably, and 1.4dB isn't much more than that ;^)  Secondly, I'm adjusting the volume for my own preference, and on my current device, I have reduced the volume quite a lot down from max, when listening to that Thiollier recording. There is no way you can know what absolute volume I am actually listening at. ;^) I do have the volume at 100% for your recording, which makes the loudest point very loud. (possibly a bit too loud)  I agree/understand that dynamic range plays into all this significantly.

Ok. I've come to accept YouTube as generally producing very high quality audio, and I don't think my opinion would change if I were to listen to uncompressed versions of the recordings.

Greg.

Tony DeSare consistently records with a closely mic'd sound that I think is *perfect*:
https://youtu.be/W00KgLaqFZ0

Michael - you say that it's easy to get a closely mic'd sound from Pianoteq. IMHO, it is NOT easy to get a sound as detailed and *clear* as this example. If you disagree, please give me a preset. ;^)

Greg

Good luck:

https://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_level.php?lvl=1

Greg
(previous reply deleted - I forgot to include the link)

This test is not relevant for what we are talking about.

Music is not a sinusoidal wave, and personally, I clearly hear the difference, as well as I distinguish red and green. I am certainly not the only one.

Although I may have suppressed the memory of experiences equally unpleasant as the perusal of your posts has proven to be, Michael, I can’t recall ever coming across anything as insufferably self-aggrandizing, blasé and ridiculous as the combination of your conceited words, on the one hand, with the plain mediocrity of the accompanying audio examples, on the other.

If that was all there was to it however, I wouldn’t have entered this thread. One reads, one winces, one shakes the head sadly and one moves on. What drew me in though, is the condescending, intolerant and borderline rude tone that you take with anyone who refuses to bow reverently before the altar of Modelling Audio Productions. Now, you can be as full of yourself as you like, for all I care — and if ‘being full of oneself’ were an Olympic sport, you’re without a doubt guaranteed a string of shiny medals — and that’s no problem. Neither is the fact that you produce unremarkable and even flawed work with Pianoteq. But when you then add that disrespectful, patronizing and arrogant attitude with which you counter critical remarks, someone really needs to say so something, I feel.
(‘Ultra’ does indeed merit a place in this thread but not, as you would like, in connection to the degree of realism of your Pianoteq-efforts, but instead to describe the level of arrogance and disdain which characterizes your every sentence. It’s quite amazing, really.)

Anyway.

My opinion on the audio material: there is nothing ultra-realistic happening in any of these examples. At best, you have the problematic mock-realism of a passable simulation of a very questionable, amateuristic piano recording. After all your “several years of work and research” and with all your oh-so-secret acoustic and psychoacoustic studies, you’ve ended up with little more than a, to my ears, most unappealing, muffled, diffused, blurred, excessively reverbed pianosound that does no justice or service whatsoever to either the power of the Pianoteq software or the beauty of the music. (At least 50% of Mr. Aznar's rather fine performance of Colliwog’s Cakewalk, for example, all but vanishes in the unmusical wash of sound that you turned his playing into.)

You’ve pushed your instrument so far back in the virtual space that the all-important, realism-defining detail — the real test for anyone aiming and claiming to get believable results with Pianoteq — is simply taken out of the equation. That’s easy of course. Anyone can do that. Place Pianoteq so far back and bury it under so much reverberation, that all the challenges related to trying to make “Pianoteq in a space” a convincing illusion no longer come into play. It's actually quite perplexing that it took you several years of research, work and study to arrive at this insight. Most people … ah well, never mind.

Also typical for people like you, and so predictable, is that, the moment a critical word appears, rather than engage in a serious and constructive discussion, you immediately pollute and sour the conversation with disparaging and belittling snides, irrelevant pseudo-expertise and, in at least two instances, ignorant nonsense. (The latter being especially embarassing for the so-called Pianoteq- and sound-expert which you pretend to be, if you don’t me saying so.)

If yours was the only audio material in existence to give us an idea of “the realism than can be achieved with Pianoteq”, I wouldn’t even consider buying the software, because you would have lead me to believe Pianoteq to be a mediocre-sounding toy that is capable of only the vaguest and most superficial of piano-simulations and one, moreover, which I don’t particularly like the sound of.

Allow me to end with the kind suggestion that you spend your next several years of work and research first and foremost on learning about modesty and humility. If for no other reason than that it will earn you a lot more goodwill from your audience, and you’re going to need all the goodwill you can get if the quality your work with Pianoteq remains what it is today.

_

+1

Sure enough.  I (reluctantly) checked these latest "offerings" to see his current "state of the art".

Sad to report, I used to get better Piano Sounds out of my 2002 Win-XP machine using a built-in Sound Blaster Synthesizer.

The rest of us have come a long way since then...

to my mind, Piet's spot-on observations aside, what is particularly galling is that on the soundcloud pages for his "Piano Talents Series" there is not a single reference to Pianoteq, only that the various works were recorded "on a Steinway B": disingenuous at best...

Yes, I have had 16 years of experience and research with this wonderful SoundBlaster.  I challenge anybody to injure or defame such a wonderful component, an asset to ANYBODY'S Programming Arsenal.

And, for the right price, I will turn ANYBODY'S MIDI-file into an MP-3 file that can actually be listened to,  with or without enjoyment, that part is not guaranteed, sorry.

Oh, I forgot.  The Sound-Blaster Card died a decade or so back, but even in its ineffable silence it still sounds better than some samples we've heard recently, not to name any names because of defame and injury and such, but the silence is really PEACEFUL and I challenge ANYBODY to make a more effective Silence with any audio equipment of their choice!

I have always understood that forums such as this are for enthusiasts to share experiences, help each other etc. As MAP have reported posters re defamation etc, my question is, is MAP posting on here within the normal forum rules or are they doing it, at least in part, for commercial reasons?

I respect Modartt's way of doing business; I would like to know if organisations involved commercially in the production of digital music can use this site for commercial reasons and if so, what is permissable in this respect and what is not.

Pianophile, I can understand that it seems improbable and presumptuous, because when I started using Pianoteq, I did not have myself the idea to increase the realism. I found the sound perfect, and it still is.

Nobody believed that you could make classical music recordings with Pianoteq.

This is where all our work is different.

I don’t think so. The answer is in what I said above.

No. Think again, it took us a lot of time and research to understand how to apply in Pianoteq the principles of spreading the sound of a grand piano in a concert hall.

For example, place a mics stereo pair at 5 meters in Pianoteq and do the same thing with a '' real '' piano, in a '' real '' concert hall, then compare carefully …

The reverb parameters are extremely complex to understand, and the concert hall acoustics is a subject that I can claim to know well for having studied in a very thorough and rigorous way the characteristics of more than 350 concert halls around the world, sometimes with the help of the acoustics laboratories themselves when they were kind enough to respond to us.
If you listen to our recordings, you will hear that the reverb is completely merged with the piano, which is not the case in any of Pianoteq's default presets (this is not the goal of Modartt anyway), nor in any recordings that I could hear. (I'm talking about classical music here)

It is impossible to achieve this result if you do not have a solid knowledge of room acoustics and classical sound recording.

You may not immediately hear the difference in our recordings, but practice, and it will jump to your ears like a trumpet next to your eardrum.

True. Modartt’s model itself is perfect.

No. When you try to make a piano recording with Pianoteq, you come across a lot of acoustic and psychoacoustic problems that you have to solve, and this requires very specific settings of Pianoteq's parameters, and also a lot of audio processing outside of Pianoteq.

I hope my answer will help you.

Two questions (bearing in mind that MAP is offering a professional recording service):
1) If you had bought a CD (making exceptions for incredibly rare historical recordings) which sounded like those demo examples, would you be happy?
2) If you were an aspiring concert pianist, and your performance was featured in these demos, would you be satisfied that your talent had been well represented?

I know what my answers would be.

Special note for MAP: you have clearly set yourself on your chosen course, and good luck to you. But will you please at least admit that your style of recording may not be to everyone's taste?

Great heavens above, here we go again. I didn't actually say that I didn't like the recordings, there is clearly some very fine pianism being showcased here. But in my opinion, please note IN MY OPINION, the sound quality falls short of the professional standard that you claim to offer.
(FWIW I much prefer the sound of the second of the 2 'Player' examples you uploaded in one of your posts here)

I'm not trying to .... oh, what's the use...