Hello Michal,
I loaded the four Steinway presets you described above, and did so in the same order that you had mentioned.
Here are my findings:
The headphone experience is INCAPABLE of reproducing the live experience of sitting at a real grand piano and playing it as seated on the bench located in front of the keys. The main reason is that the sounds as heard through headphones ... seem to come from INSIDE one's head, along a line situated behind your eyeballs and extending from ear-to-ear, rather than from an instrument in front of you (OUTSIDE your head) at which you are seated. When I listened to all of your mentioned presets (and indeed for all of Pianoteq's presets for all modeled pianos), I can distinctly tell that the audio signal is panned left or right or together to form a center experience. However, when a signal is panned to the right (for example) in a pair of headphones, that simply means the signal is attenuated in the left earcup! Such does not happen when you are seated at a real piano: BOTH EARS hear sound emanating from the rightmost side of the piano when you play the highest notes! While I agree that none of the sound is panned hard right or hard left, even the most sophisticated and expensive headphones/earbuds are incapable of reproducing the effect of both ears sensing sound coming from the right or left side of the keyboard.
Headphones are incapable of reproducing a "vertical" element to the hearing experience, at least in a way one hears from a real piano. This is even more true when you are seated at a good grand piano whose lid is propped wide open. In the real thing, you can hear sounds from "above" bouncing off the insides of the raised lid. You also hear sounds of the piano's action action ... simultaneously originating from a plane BELOW ear level. Moreover, you hear the sound of the piano reflecting off the floor and into your ears. These reflected sounds are different if the piano is placed on a wooden floor, a tiled floor, or on a carpeted floor.
Using any electronic keyboard (as opposed to being seated at a real grand piano), there is no "tactile feedback" of the soundboard's vibrations happening to vibrate back through the action and into your fingers! Want proof? Try playing an interval of a minor second on a pair of the lowest bass notes, and notice how your fingers pick up vibrations representing the positive- and negative reinforcement of the sound waves. (When tuning a piano, I regularly use this tactile vibratory feedback of the keys' surfaces to detect "beats" when two notes are sounded together.)
Even when you play high notes on a real grand piano, especially when the lid is fully raised, you will ALSO HEAR the soundboard sending you high frequencies from the "bass section" of the soundboard. Why? That's because the grains of a spruce soundboard run parallel to the bridges, so as to carry the sound more or less evenly across the entire soundboard! The same thing happens in an opposite sense when you play bass notes on a large grand piano: you will also hear some of the sound coming from the right side of the piano!
As stated earlier, there is no pair of headphones or earbuds with current technology that can accurately reproduce these effects as though they are occurring "outside" the confines of those headphones!
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Enough of my rambling.
Cheers,
Joe
