Perfect piano(teq) sound

Ecaroh:

You make a good point.  When I had an acoustic grand piano, some days it sounded great and on other days, not so good.  The piano and the room acoustics did not change from day to day.

My perception of the sound changed - largely I think because of my mood or physical condition (tired or rested).

This same phenomenon will apply to a generated sound too.

This is so easy to forget when evaluating a physical model.  And if one is "in love" with samples, then there is a predisposition to down-rate anything else.

Glenn

This collection is very good for making comparisons and getting the big picture of the field of digital piano sounds. Still missing some V-piano presets...

One thing to keep in mind is that best (the most real) sound to listen is not allways the best to play. Listeners and players are hearing different piano sound. Softwares like pianoteq are on the right way: you can have good player's perspective when playing or recording a midifile and then play it out from audience's perspective. By the way this is maybe one of the weaknesses of V-piano: it's has no parametres of (mic) distance etc. V-piano is for player. 

This makes me think that softwares and even hardware pianos in the future must have capability to produce two piano sounds at the same time: one for player and one for audience (trough mixer).

Just a question.

Who here believe that could be fine implement a two new Lid position variation?

I suggest:

-Completely removed lid. Like some cases when they remove the lid from the piano.

-Anterior portion of lid open or closed. To adjust just the small portion of the front.

This is an excellent post and reflects my experiences almost exactly. Most of all, if I listen to another player's performance in PT it always sound superior to my own. A large part of this obviously is the sad fact that most players are far more advanced than me but even accounting for that I just don't seem to be able to produce a 'perfect' sound that others appear able to. I even contacted Hugh Sung to check what settings he was using and they are pretty much default.

I have concluded in the past that the fault lies mainly with my somewhat unconventional setup in that I have a 'silent' acoustic piano with midi interface and I am not sure it is capable of producing a decent 'sound' that standard keyboards seem able to - although there's no apparent reason for that. There again, I used to think it was OK when using a Roland hard synth until I got dissatisfied with that so maybe there are other factors at play here...which brings us back to the original post.

Re DAW's

I use Cakewalk Home Studio for ALL my audio work and although I wouldn't call it simple (none would be) it is reasonably straightforward. I would guess others would promote their own favourites.

I agree 100% that very much of the sound comes from players fingers. As a teacher I know how different sound different students can get out from same (acoustic) instrument. And for companies it's obviously wise to get a professional player to make demos..

One more thing that makes me still wonder is this (old) question about latency. No matter how good the sound, it's not possible for me fool myself that I'm playing real instrument if I have to listen to my sound with delay.. Software piano can sound fantastic when playing a midifile but same pianosoft can feel terrible (and then "sound" also) if there is latency. For a drummer latency is a total disaster: In fact we could not record anything with software-drums in real time. On the other hand these latency problems causing "cracks" destroy the illusion as well. I think most hardware pianos still beat softwares in this respect, am I right?

When I read about those guys using pianoteq at live situation I wonder how they can handle this latency issue? Do they have kind of secret knowledge that I don't have to get rid of latency. (For me personally 64 samples buffer might be good enough but it doesn't provide a sound completely without "cracks") Or are they used (or practised) to play with this latency? Is so that when you play lot with a softwarepiano with latency you kind of forget how does it feel to play real instrument. I would like to hear comments about "acceptable" limits for latency and how they relate to playability and perceived feeling and sound...?

Anyway all these replies have shown how complex issue is this question about piano sound and its relationship to other psychological and physical factors.   

Pekka, Finland

Grrr... I don't think I could ever manage with 10ms latency. And I'm quite convinced that take any piano player who has been playing ONLY acoustic instrument and ask him to play PTQ with 10 ms latency and he won't buy that.

Its strange. I notice this as well, while playing on a Steinway D model. Some days it sound synthetic and felt like it needed that Pianoteq style tweaking.

It did sound marvellous though, when a high quality player took over playing it!