Hi, I build a baby grand piano with midi controller and I use Pianoteq of course for the sound reproduction. What could be the not too big speakers I should put inside my piano for an accurate sound reproduction and have the feeling of the real thing as much as possible
tks
Seby
I am working on the same thing I think... I have all the strings and metal frame removed from a baby grand and will be trying to find best speakers to fit with lid down when I close it up... I am thinking good surround sound speakers suspended not touching sound board with 2 aimed at sound board and 2 up toward lid and another 2 speakers aimed at me and a sub woofer on the floor somewhere.
It will be fun and interesting to see what I can get. I wonder if PianoTeq already adds enough wood sound and this will be overkill? Hmmmm interesting.
I have a Casio PX 350 with about 2 inches I carefully sawed off the empty plastic bits on the right side so it fits where old keys and hammers and things were.
What i found with just an open set of speakers is that just a 4" woofer sounds better than a larger one. To me what makes Pianoteq sound realistic are the overtones particularly in the bass. You need to be able to hear them clearly. Larger woofers are just too bassy and lose the overtones that are so necessary. So for me. I' satisfied with about a $75.00 Logitec computer speaker set up with a just a 4" woofer in a not very large box. You will really have to be careful if you are going to cut holes in the sound board for the speakers. I think it might be better to leave the sound board as is until you are confident that you have the right combination of the right sized speakers.
From:http://www.kawai-global.com/product/ca98/
Speakers TwinDrive Soundboard Speaker System
7 cm x 4
1.4 cm x 2
Notice they are using rather small speakers to reproduce the sound of an acoustic grand.
No cutting of sound board going on here. Suspending speakers as stated. I want to see/hear how sound board might come into play as well as the lid up and down... I have used small surround sound speakers before but on a bit of carpet I had on the sound board... so trying different thins... Agree on the Sub... not too big at all.
1. PianoTeq advanced features allow you to set up several channels for several speakers. I think you should try this, maybe positioning the PianoTeq mics in the same place as your speakers (for a start).
2. I think small subwoofers can add a lot of the feeling of lower frequencies that 4" speakers can't reach. A few tricks:
- Set volume by ear so they blend in with other speakers. Then drop volume a bit more so you feel them rather than hear them. The effect should be very subtle.
- Positioning subs is really tough but the "crawl around the room method" works fine and is easy.
- If you get two subs then positioning becomes much less critical so this is really the way to go; there is a good white paper by Harmon, the US audio company regarding this. Small subs are very cheap on craigslist as people are not into home theatre or audio anymore.
Sounds like a fascinating project. As a quick experiment, I put some contact speakers under the soundboard of my 56 Bluethner and drove them using a wav file output from pianoteq playing a midi file. Sounded surprisingly good at lower volumes! So contact speakers might be an approach, however that would require an existing soundboard in decent shape.
Another idea would be to clone a Yamaha AvantGrand regarding speaker count, size, location etc.
Sounds like a fascinating project. As a quick experiment, I put some contact speakers under the soundboard of my 56 Bluethner and drove them using a wav file output from pianoteq playing a midi file. Sounded surprisingly good at lower volumes! So contact speakers might be an approach, however that would require an existing soundboard in decent shape.
Another idea would be to clone a Yamaha AvantGrand regarding speaker count, size, location etc.
Cool.