A thick soundcarpet

Best way to get this type of sound currently is to use an outboard processor -or software effect/VST- controllable with MIDI continuous control such as an expression pedal.  Your right foot would already be on sustain/damper so your left foot could control the external/internal effect level.  Experiment with delays/slapback with the feedback turned up.  This will cause a feedback loop that will build upon itself as you increase the effect level with the expression pedal.  You can also run the output of this effect into a separate amp modeler or light tube distortion of your flavor.  Quick multi-tap random delays are good.  I am fortunate to have an older Yamaha UD Stomp which has 8 simultaneous delay channels that you can go wacky with and full MIDI control including its own expression in jack.  There's a lot of inexpensive solutions these days - virtual effects in particular.  A good place to look for plug-ins is at http://www.kvraudio.com

Thank You for your response!

Joe, If my understanding of your post is correct it would be impossible to get this sound out of a recording of a real piano... (I must say that I haven't listened to this in recordings...)

The reason why I ask this is because Pianoteq simulate the piano and therefore should have more possibilities to simulate even this effect... Even if it is impossible to get it just as mighty as on a real grand it would be possible to build the sound a little bit more...  ;-)

And again: ThankYou!

Hello Gentlemen,

Thank you for your kind comments about my posting in thread.

@Glenn,

It's very gladdening to read that you are an applied scientist; likewise, I am a retired metallurgical engineer with advanced degrees in Metallurgical and Materials (Non-ferrous materials and polymers/composites) Engineering.  Although playing the piano for 54 years since age 3, I concurrently spent approximately 30 years in the USA steel industry, and sang for ten seasons with Sir Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Chorus. 

In addition, I have been tuning pianos since the 1960's.   I didn't acquire any formal education on the workings of pianos, but I have learned to observe pianos, and operation of their actions, with my eyes and listen to them with my ears, literally from the inside out of the instrument from an engineering vantage point.

Regarding the capability of state-of-the-art home/studio audio systems to fool a musician's ears that one is listening to an actual piano, I must state that I have heard some remarkable systems -- but have never mistook the sound of any stereo system for a real piano, or trumpet, or drum, etc.

One of the closest experiences of hearing a symphony orchestra reproduced was a recording session of Hector Berlioz's "Damnation of Faust", where I quietly sat in the back of the listening room as London/Decca records' engineers played back a digital recording to Solti on some custom B&W loudspeakers made for London/Decca.   The sound was marvelous!  It was loud!  It was dynamic!  .... but it still sounded like a recording in comparison to having been on the stage in Medinah Temple in Chicago with the 200+ chorus members plus 80+ CSO members playing live.

Now, back to Pianoteq:
I do not have delusions that a real grand piano is in the room when I play on Pianoteq.  Rather, the best it (and any other recorded sound medium) can do, is sound like an extremely fine recording of a well-regulated and maintained, concert-quality piano in a believable acoustic perspective.   I ask for no more than that, for the reasons of limitations of the sound reproduction process, cited in my first reply, apply to this thread.

Cheers,

Joe

This is an interesting discussion about the limits of sound reproduction (as compared to production) which could also be extended to other areas of perception, like photography versus what our eyes (and brain) really sees or the illusion of life provided by movies, but let's restrain it to sound.

I also sang in symphony orchestra choirs and with smaller ensembles, but the effect of being inside a group of musicians is quite different from listening to the same from a distance, even in the best halls. This is similar to the player's position near the piano versus the audience listening from afar. This local effect can be approximated with good binaural recordings listened through headphones but I think it is harder to attain with louspeakers.

The best result I can think of as a good audience experience is a well recorded SACD such as the lastest Suzuki Bach recordings that reproduce very well the acoustics of a particular location kept constant throughout the series. The hall sound itself is then so well reproduced in multi-channel that it can mask the real room acoustics in which the listening is done, and be very close to a you-are-there experience (with a very good sound system of course) and I don't need a very high volume to get this effect. My amplifiers provide me with a total of about 500 watts rms for five channels (4+subw) but this power is just needed for peaks.

So, I was a bit skeptical about Joe Felice's power demands for piano sound reproducing since I still find very convincing listening to a good piano recording through headphones where probably less than one watt is needed...And anybody that was in a club or near a car with a booming sound system, or to a show given outdoors with loud amplification, can understand that it is easy to produce more decibels than a full symphony orchestra. Raw sound output is not music! It is noise.

But, when trying to play pianoteq (or other electronic instruments) through my high quality sound system, I was never impressed compared to using a pair of 200$ headphones. I know it might be a bit better with monitors that are made expressly for this purpose, but usually these are much more colored and this coloring of sound is to me unbearable.

I also tried multi-channel output and ambiophonic simulations in the past, but these don't work out well with pianoteq to my ears. The source has to be tailored explicitely for these "illusions" to work. Headphones still win.

So until real advances are made in sound equipment that completely eliminate coloring of sound at high volume and also reproduce a three-dimensional sound field that is not limited to a single point (you can have many but they are still point-sources) I will consider pianoteq a sound-reproducing instrument that I can play and enjoy, just as much as I would a good recording, but it is enjoyable to me only through headphones, this is the price to pay I think.

That's the problem with large "music instrument" speakers, they move more air easily (in the bass region mainly) so they distort less but still color the sound too much for me.

I know first hand about them too because when I was much younger, I used to play lead guitar in a band, and the sound we tried to get from the guitar was mostly "created" by the speaker and the "specialized" amp, not hi-fi at all. I did at that time try a hi-fi amp, and was surprised that most of the sound I associated with my guitar disappeared and distortion set in pretty fast too!

Of course, now I only hear pianos live (unamplified) in concert halls, I can't stand any amplification for classical concerts such as is done sometimes for free outdoors concerts that we get here in the summer.

By the way my subwoofer is a self-powered Velodyne with a 15" cone, great for frequencies under maybe 80-100Hz but filtered out higher.

Let's talk about this in a little more detail.  The tension imparted into a piano string is placed there in the manufacturer's scale design.  That tension takes the form of potential energy to cause the string to vibrate to and fro after it is struck by the hammer.  If there were no string tension, there would be no potential energy to convert to kinetic energy and back to potential energy -- basically the mechanics of a pendulum's oscillation in a gravitational field.

I agree with you that the total amount of potential energy remains constant, before and after the hammer has struck the string and after the string has come to rest.  The small amount of additional energy of the person's finger and resulting hammer impact sets the strings' oscillations into motion, and (after accounting for mechanical inefficiencies, etc. etc,) the desired by-product of this instrument is the acoustic energy heard by our ears.

If my original statement was found to misleading, then I apologize.  However, one cannot argue that modern instruments with their cast iron frames support many times the string tension of the wooden framed pianos of Mozart's time;  as a direct result, modern pianos are capable of emitting far more sound as a result of this increased string tension.

The point I was making was that a fixed number of speaker transducers whose only functions are to move the air ... cannot do so in the manner that a piano makes sounds.  The speakers are limited in their surface areas and their excursion levels.  When many piano notes are played loudly on even a good stereo system, the sound "comparatively" collapses.  In contrast, in a real piano, where more and more strings' overtones are called into play ... the sound "grows".

It would be foolish to believe that a stereo system (given large enough speakers and powerful enough amplifiers) cannot get "louder" than a piano.  However, it is not only loudness we are talking about, here.  I submit that, sitting blindfolded in the same room with a Steinway D and a mastering quality stereo system, in a double blind test, I could still identify the real Steinway a statistically significant percentage higher than by mere 50-50 chance.

I would agree with your statement quoted above.  The only item I question is "who" has the clear lack of understanding.  In effect, a digital recording is effectively a "high speed barometer", capable of measuring ambient atmospheric pressure some 44,100, 48000, 96000 or 192000 times per second, and displaying for each sample the magnitude of the ambient air pressure.  Sometimes the air pressure is greater than ambient (a pressure wave), and sometimes the instantaneous air pressure is a trifle below ambient.  A to D and D to A converters work to encode and decode this information.  The result is similar to the signal intended to be captured and amplified by the squiggles of a phonograph needle.

The number of bits available is what finely distinguishes the various magnitudes of air pressure measurement.  These various various magnitudes are represented in base 2, with ones and zeros.  The point I was alluding to in the original post, was when the sound level gets excessive, the capturing/reproducing system literally runs out of "ones" (and runs into digital clipping).

Upon reading Mr. aandrmusic's statement quoted above, I subsequently went to the internet and Google searched "24-bit 144dB".  Here is one reply from Wiki --- of course, one may choose to believe or disbelieve what is written in the Wiki article and is quoted from the following URL:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_bit_depth

Digital audio

A set of digital audio samples contains data that, when converted into an analog signal, provides the necessary information to reproduce the sound wave. In pulse-code modulation (PCM) sampling, the bit depth will limit quantities such as dynamic range and signal-to-noise ratio. The bit depth will not limit frequency range, which is limited by the sample rate.

By increasing the sampling bit depth, smaller fluctuations of the audio signal can be resolved (also referred to as an increase in dynamic range). The 'rule-of-thumb' relationship between bit depth and dynamic range is, for each 1-bit increase in bit depth, the dynamic range will increase by 6 dB (see Signal-to-noise ratio#Fixed point). 24-bit digital audio has a theoretical maximum dynamic range of 144 dB, compared to 96 dB for 16-bit; however, current digital audio converter technology is limited to dynamic ranges of ~120 dB because of 'real world' limitations in integrated circuit design.[1]

Technically speaking, bit depth is only meaningful when applied to pure PCM devices. Non-PCM formats, such as DSD or lossy compression systems like MP3, have bit depths that are not defined in the same sense as PCM. This is particularly true for lossy audio compression, where bits are allocated to other types of information, and the bits actually allocated to individual samples are allowed to fluctuate within the constraints imposed by the allocation algorithm.

I agree with your statement that if the alternate sound (to an electronic reproducing system) is a 9 foot soundboard, it won't happen.

So, let me ask you, please ... did there have to be this many words exchanged, when, in the end we each agree on the last colloquial statement?

Cheers,

Joe

EDIT:  Aha!  We had a troll in our midst.  The following quote is cited in one thread just before this entry.

Did you mean this direction?:

http://www.forum-pianoteq.com/uploads.p...ing_01.mp3

I still do miss something too- when you hit the keys of a real grand very hard the sound becomes very expressive and "edgy". This is what I still miss a little in PTQ.
But after tweaking the parameters in PTQ-Pro and Version 3.6 I don't wanna play  other digital instruments anymore.
greetings,
Heinke

yes, Azrael4, its quite good, but not really there yet...
Cellomangler, I still think that this "effect" is possible to modeling, maybe I'm wrong, I'm not a programmer.... And maybe, the possibility for the pianosound to grow in this way is one thing that should improve the sound (even if the speaker can't handle it...)? I don't know?

I thought I had, but probably not enough....

but it's right, this increase the effect a lot! At the same time it makes the sound deeper in a way... I think I like this... It's more alive... (even if its not only positive...)

Thank You!

I assume you are talking about using multiple 16 bit (or other length) words strung/tied together, end-to-end so to speak, to increase the bit depth and thus the dynamic range?  (I'm not a rocket scientist, but I play one on TV)  Doesn't this require a major change in hardware for playback and recording, not to mention playback on dedicated devices?  Seems music technology keeps giving us tons of cool gadgets and fun ways of making music but the quality of the final audio has been allowed to degenerate, ei, MP3 and even compact discs.  I think it's been decided that our lives are filled with so much ambient noise that we can't appreciate dynamic range anymore -we wouldn't hear the subtleties over the roar.  At least there's still live performance, if done right with corporal punishment for rude mobile devices...