Oh, one more thing... There is a lot of talk here about whether the Pianoteq sound is this way or that way; whether the compression or EQ is like this or like that; if one reverb is better than the other; or if it's better to listen through certain monitors or headphones, etc. The "sound problem" always seems to be something "out there," but what about our own auditory response—our frequency response, or whatever we want to call it?
Engineers work with spectrograms, where the comparison between the real and the simulated is objective. We, on the other hand, are guided by our ears… which vary from person to person. If we all took a serious audiometry test, we would see that, just like the rest of our bodies and sensory systems, we are unique in how we hear.
This is even more relevant if we consider the average age of Pianoteq users, which I assume is middle-to-advanced. That’s where the differences become more acute; it’s not just that we hear "less" as we age, but that our response curve becomes increasingly personalized—whether due to genetic decline or the wear and tear of our daily and professional lives.
I know this is just a bit of "thinking out loud," but I simply wanted to point out that when we talk about the nasality or the harshness of a specific patch or register in Pianoteq, the Modern D, or any other instrument, we are, to a large extent, talking about something that is inside our heads, not outside. When we share sonic experiences trying to pin down a problem, we are speaking from individual perspectives; we talk about different things while believing we are talking about the same thing—hence the disagreements. I don’t see only aesthetic issues here (of course, you might like a brighter sound or more reverb than others), but physical issues—or rather, sensory singularities. These may be far more relevant than we think, because we want to believe the cliché that hearing problems are "an old person thing," and we are never that, of course.
dikrek wrote:Hi all, I made another attempt.
Here’s the Modern D recording from David Lai:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZTgDvFS-uk
He gave me his MIDI file and I did this with a modified NYD Player preset plus some external reverb and saturation and EQ:
https://pianoclack.s3.us-east-1.amazona...player.mp3
I know several of the folks in that forum dislike Pianoteq but I’ve been trying to figure out the invariants of this.
So - in my version, what’s missing?
To me it sounds good. I’m using balanced Sennheiser HD560S and a high end headphone amp with a balanced connection.
I’m not claiming either sounds better. If anything, the sustains and resonance on Modern D seem a bit… restrained.
And the room tone and reverb in Modern D aren’t to my liking. So I didn’t try to replicate that.
It may be useful to focus also on the more intense parts like from 1:40-2:30, or around minute 4.
The people that dislike Pianoteq keep saying those parts sound totally artificial and not at all like a piano.
