A lot of sound experience is due to habit, I think. When I first switched to Pianoteq, it took some getting used to. Also when I switched my active monitors a few weeks ago: every setup is different, and even if they look quite 'perfect' on paper (very linear speakers, at ideal distance etc.), no setup really is 'neutral'. So, of course the built-in speakers will sound different from your monitor speakers. The question which is 'better' is probably a matter of opinion, but of course your opinion is what counts in this case.
Regarding latency: I would find that very surprising. Normally MIDI over USB introduces very little actual latency and jitter of just about a millisecond. If you are not using any cascaded USB hubs or stuff like that, you shouldn't be experiencing noticeable latency. If you feel the latency is much larger than with other controllers, perhaps you should measure it. You should at least be able to measure differences between the built-in sound generator and Pianoteq. I did this with a Casio once and got about 8ms of effective latency, which is in my case caused largely by the sound device, so this result was consistent and fine.
Normally everything below 10ms should be unnoticeable. Even somewhat larger values usually are no big problem, and even the speaker distance matters (latency increases by about 3ms for every metre). And a real piano also has some latency. So, if you are experiencing latency differences, it might just be the two different piano actions and their mechanical behaviours feeling differently to you.
As I said, an actual MIDI problem would be quite surprising to me. To actually make the sound be audibly delayed, we are talking about 50, maybe even 100ms. The 10ms threshold is the point from which on most people can tell that two audio signals are not exactly simultaneous; the point where hand movements become 'detached' from what you hear is a lot higher, IMHO. Many people don't notice e.g. if a movie is not perfectly synchronised even if the difference is 2-3 frames... and at 24fps, one frame equals 42ms (in a cinema, the distance to the speakers can be 20 metres, which alone means 60ms of latency).
Last edited by kalessin (10-08-2014 07:16)
Pianoteq 6 Standard (Steinway D&B, Grotrian, Petrof, Steingraeber, Bechstein, Blüthner, K2, YC5, U4, Kremsegg 1&2, Karsten, Electric, Hohner)