[ Closed ] New ultra-realistic demo recordings with Pianoteq Steinway B! (Page 2 of 2)

Dear dazric,

In fact, I must also thank you for commenting and enjoying some of our recordings. In particular the Scarlatti recording by Pierre Wolf.

I would sincerely like you to understand that I have nothing against your opinion here.

What is unfortunate is that many of the comments that have been made in this thread are not constructive, and, more importantly, some whose sole and only purpose is to tarnish my honor and reputation.

Sincerely

Michael

(Sorry, Niclas, but I *had* to write this.)

Michael,

The administration forwarded me your message — as was to be expected: a message heavy with pomposity, ego and indignation — in which you insist that, unless I want to find myself crushed under the heel of the French judicial system’s boot, I must “correct” my previous post, and I am to do so in public. I’d love to oblige and make you feel better, because that’s the sort of person I am (spreading sweetness and light whenever I can), but I’m afraid that on this occasion, I can’t. You see, your demand for correction implies that there is something wrong with that post of mine, and I just don’t see what that could be. Apart from a few linguistic errors and typing mistakes, that is.

Anyway, here I am again. En publique, as you requested.
Let’s review what has occurred thus far, shall we? What follows was not written hastily and in no way intended to tarnish your honour or reputation. I’m not so nasty or foolish to attempt to do what you yourself do so much better.

You come in here, boasting about your extra-ordinary “ultra-realistic” achievements with Pianoteq — like an alchemist who, after countless years of research, study and hard work, claims to have unlocked the secret of how to make gold — but when we then listen to your audio examples, several among us quickly arrive at the opinion that what you have discovered is not quite “gold”, not to our ears anyway, but something far less special. Perhaps a result not entirely without value and merit, sure, but certainly not what any of us would be willing to describe as gold.

(It’s very much like that Blackadder episode, second series, in which Lord Percy claims to have discovered how to make gold, when in fact, all he stumbled upon was how to make some non-descript, worthless ‘green’. The difference here being that Lord Percy is a ficticious, totally harmless and very amusing nincompoop, whereas you are a very real, rather vainglorious and particularly unpleasant individual.)

There is a word, you know, for people who boastfully present their ‘green’ as if it were ‘gold’: charlatans.

But, like I said earlier, if that was all there was to it, no one would have bothered to give your little self-serving show much attention. We’d have raised our eyebrows for a second, maybe sighed a long sad sigh, the way witnesses to tragic events or bad clowns do, but we would have left it at that. I certainly would have.

The whole aspect of the situation changed however the moment aWc had the unfathomable audacity to put one or two question marks next to the quality of your work and added that he prefers his pianos to sound a little more close-up and more detailed. (Note that all of this was clearly given by aWc as his personal opinion, and expressed politely and respectfully.)

And it was your reaction to aWc which I felt could no longer be brushed aside as mere inconsequential sillyness: you suspected him of having a hidden agenda — if I ommitted before to mention ‘paranoia’ as one of your less endearing characteristics, allow me to include it here and now —, you belittled his opinion as being ignorant and unconstructive, indirectly and slyly questioned his hearing abilities as well, and treated him with such a degree of arrogance and haughtyness, that I could not longer resist stepping in and say a few words of my own.

So I did. I shared and amplified aWc’s views, also mentioned having a very low opinion of your “ultra-realistic” Pianoteq-efforts (both technically and musically), gave it as my further opinion that I think you’re unbelievably full of yourself and that, in at least two instances, you gave yourself away as someone who doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.

Shall we have a look at those two instances? If not for your self-improvement — I don’t nurture much hope there, I must say — then maybe your lawyer might find it a useful read.

Firstly, there is your statement that it is much easier to present a Pianoteq piano as if it were recorded with your head (or the microphones) under the lid than to present it from some distance in a virtual space. See, as anyone who’s actually experienced with Pianoteq would know: that is just wrong.
While Pianoteq has no difficulty whatsoever to create the illusion of distance, currently, it is still impossible for the software to generate a pianosound that suggests an extreme, mics-very-close-to-the-strings proximity. The closest Pianoteq can be positioned at the moment is a distance which in sample libraries is often called the ‘player perspective’. Or somewhere thereabouts anyway. Despite that fact that several presets in Pianoteq are named ‘under the lid’ and that, on the GUI, you can indeed place the mics in that very spot, the actual sound Pianoteq generates will still always suggest an amount of distance between the source and the microphones that is noticeably bigger than the ‘under the lid’-description suggests. No doubt there will come a day when Modartt succeeds in modifying their models in such a way that ‘under the lid’ becomes a perfectly accurate description of what we’re hearing, but today that still isn’t the case. The current real situation is, in other words, the very opposite of what you say it is. It is, in fact, *much* easier to place Pianoteq a few, or several, virtual meters away in some virtual space, than it is to create a convincing aural illusion that one’s head is under the lid and that one can hear the full embracing immediacy, impact and all the detail that such a recording technique would produce. (That’s also the explanation by the way why the extremely close-up and intimate Nils Frahm pianosound, or anything similar to that, is still something that falls outside the timbral territory covered by today’s Pianoteq.)

Secondly, there is this very bizarre sentence of yours: “I’m not sure that the Pianoteq model has a bass problem, especially since the original model was selected by Martha Argerich herself.” It’s this line that inspired me to use the words “embarrassing ignorance” in my previous post. Because what you’re saying here implies that you are unaware of (or, dare I say it, deaf to) Pianoteq’s modelling technology having any problems of its own, and that, if a timbrally pristine instrument is chosen as the source, so Pianoteq’s model thereof will be. It’s a nice thought of course, and I’m sure we all wish such to be the case, but sadly, we’re not quite there yet. (As I’m convinced 90% of the users and all of the developers will agree.) The sonic and timbral problems that Pianoteq still battles with today — most of them minor and to a degree maskable, yes — are not inherited from the instruments it models, but are entirely intrinsic to, or caused by, the still-less-than-perfect modelling technology and the limitations of the available computing power.
I’m the first to sing the praises of Modartt’s work as one of the most remarkable works-in-progress in the history of virtual instruments, and no one loves Pianoteq like I do, but I’m also the first to say that there is still some way to go and several obstacles to negotiate before wholly convincing realism will be reached.

And talking about these obstacles: “bass problems”, the existence of which you deny, is in fact one of those challenges which anyone who uses Pianoteq in their productions is faced with, or at least should be faced with if they approach their task attentively and seriously. The software, stunningly glorious though it is in many ways, still has a few of these idiosyncrasies — issues pertaining to stereo-imaging, punch, clarity and crisp definition come to mind — and difficult-to-control-bass is unquestionably one of them too. Not so much timbral bass issues, but sonic bass issues: Pianoteq, I find, tends to generate rather large quantities of low-mids and lows, and in a way that doesn’t actually help define the timbre but certainly affects the sonic contours of the signal and requires, as such, careful attention and remedying if excessive. The situation is much improved in the most recent models, I want to happily add, but the Steinway model derived from the Argerich-chosen instrument still belongs to a generation of Pianoteq models where this problem can, depending on the part given, become quite manifest.
While I completely share your enthusiasm for today’s modelling technology and the amazing level to which Modartt has developed it, unlike you however, I also remain of the opinion that there is still something of a gap between the virtual and the real and that none of the existing models earn the tag ‘perfect’.

There were a few more things you said which had me scratching my head a little in “Is he serious?”-bewilderment, but the two above are the stand-outs and more than enough to expose you as not quite the Pianoteq-expert which you pretend to be.

What irked me most of all though throughout this thread, is not that transparent tissue of mock-expertise — preposterously pathetic as I find it, especially considering the dubious quality of your work — but that pompous and supercilious air of superiority with which you prance around here, as if you are the sole Mozes to which the God of Pianosound has revealed the contents of the Stone Tablets Of Piano Recording. And most deplorable of all: the contempt and ridicule, not to mention the legal threats, with which you’ve reacted to any dissenting view.

I don’t like you, Michael. I don’t like what you say, I don’t like how you think, I don’t like your work, I don’t like how you do business. And I sure as hell don’t like how you behave towards people who see things differently than you do. [removed by forum moderator]
Piet

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For those who would benefit from it, I think there is really a misunderstanding about the expertise I claim to have.

All my talk is in the title of this thread: New ultra-realistic demo recordings with Pianoteq Steinway B!

In other words, I don’t claim to have created an '' ultra-realistic piano '' with Pianoteq, but, an '' ultra-realistic demo recording '' with Pianoteq.

It seems clear to me that this is not the same thing, and it is obvious that Modartt is better placed than us to increase the realism of Pianoteq's pianos.

Of course, I know perfectly the defects of the modeling with regard to the instrument itself (I played for a long time on very high-end grand pianos), but for the recording, these are in my opinion quite minimal.

On the other hand, I believe that the best way to discredit our expertise in the field of sound recording and concert halls acoustics, would be to present classical piano recordings, in terms of realism, superior to those we produce.
It's always easier to talk than to do.

Michael