Perfection to me, is a beautiful piano being free of distractions when I'm playing. That means no clunky notes, layers that express seamlessly, and with no notes or areas of the piano that you don't want to play. There have been so many good efforts made in taking samples but mic error, poorly prepared pianos, inconsistent sampling, using the wrong mics can render the final product flawed and in some cases without a fix. And my point was, that even with 10 gigs, you don't have the multiple lifetimes to edit all that unnecessary data which explains the inverse relationship of size vs quality. And by far it's 100% predictable that the best a set of unedited samples is going to yield is another piano with annoying defects that compromise its' use. Flawed to me means, I can't relax and know before my hands hit the keys, that there isn't a single note on that instrument that I wouldn't want to play. And perfection or near perfection is the result of the hard work it takes in eliminating those inherent defects so that you end up with a beautiful instrument. This is why PT is so interested in edited versions of their pianos because it could provide them with correction parameters for the existing model allowing them to render a new corrected model as the default model.
Mic (particularly off axis) error is one of the primary villains that degrades quality if left uncorrected. Fortunately, phase error is easily corrected by a single click but sometimes changes the character of the piano... so it's not a 'fire and forget' option. Over correction can destroy the character of the pianos causing their attacks to moosh out a bit... so a balance has to be reached.
And I have found that if you can't create a beautiful piano with 32 megs, you certainly won't do it with 32 gigs. It's all in the level of perfection you insist upon. For me, having an instrument free of defects enables me to enjoy stress free performances even when there's "seat of your pants" playing. At the end, I'm relaxed, refreshed reassured and the whole night, I didn't have to touch any EQ, or move a volume slider. PT, with its editing capabilities is like having someone take some good samples for you and then they give it to you for editing.
There are few parameters in PT that I don't use. In the D4, there are a few challenges not the least of which is a few key notes that have short decays and some that have too much hammer noise. In these cases, PT doesn't have a way to parse out the short decay envelope completely separate from the hammer noise. In a sense they crosstalk.
You have to start somewhere, so the key is to begin with mics and positioning, keeping in mind that the display isn't giving you an accurate rendering of position just relative. So the minute you move the mics to what looks like they're may be a few feet from the side of the piano... you start picking up ambience because the mics sound to me like they are actually much further away from the piano that the display indicates. That ambience might be desirable for tracks but on stage... you don't want it unless you have a special passage set up just for that sound.
As you listen keep in mind the spectral editor is key but that in turn is affected by the mics selected and their position. You also need to keep in mind that the virtual room in which all pianos are placed appears not to have any virtual acoustic treatment so you have to watch carefully that you don't move the mics in such a way as to create MORE work for yourself but sometimes there's a trade off. If moving them creates more harmonic distortion ...but the piano sounds nice otherwise, then you might leave the mics there and just plow through the spectral editor and correct from there. Chances are that you won't have to labor equally on all parts of the piano, likely you'll be concentrating your work certainly in the tenor section and a couple of other small areas, namely the middle octave and a half. The extremes of the piano roughly the lowest and highest octaves. It's pretty easy to fix anything in the spectral editor, for example the D4 has a bass note with a nasty ring at a high frequency (forget what it is at the moment). This can be very annoying and shows up on recordings especially when the piano is exposed... so you just go in the spectral editor and reduce its volume to where it is no longer annoying. This particular bass note issue is common on Steinway Ds.
But there's far more. The judicious use of adjusting the decay contour of the piano which you can do with a number of different parameters in the note editing menu. If the Roland RD800 had that ability ...it's piano could be returned to its natural decay length allowing it to cover more like a real piano. Apparently, on Roland's V1 piano which comes it at somewhere around $5000, users tell me that it does have a decay adjustment... too bad the engineers dumped that parameter from the RD800.