Topic: How to reduce unwanted ringing on the high undamped strings?
Long-time acoustic piano player. A couple of months ago I got a Korg D1 and bought PianoTeq Stage to go with it; I'm running 6.3 on a 2013 Macbook Air which despite its age seems more than adequate, no latency or other problems. I'm going with headphones for silent practice & good sound at a budget price. At the moment I have a Focusrite Scarlette for USB DAC going into a good tube hybrid headphone amp (Schiit Vali) to drive the 250 ohm model of Beyerdynamic DT 880 phones.
The sound is very good - except for one thing: Overly loud ringing of the undamped strings. I have mild right ear tinnitus and the ringing seems to bother it somewhat, even at moderate headphone volume levels. But even if I didn't have the tinnitus, I'd still think the ringing was excessive. For the Steinway D, which is my favorite model, this means that all the notes from G6# up have this ringing; for the Bluethner, my second favorite model, it's F6# and up.
In terms of what I can do about this -
1) Headphone EQ: The Equalizer built into PianoTeq does nada with this; removing or minimizing the Delay effect helps a little but not much. Supposedly the Beyerdynamic DT 880 phones do have a slight upwards bump in their treble; I have a frequency graph for them (obtained via a consumer-grade, high-latency headphone EQ app), and I can try using the low-latency Apple EQ plugin to knock that bump down a bit and see if that helps. Haven't tried this yet but will shortly.
2) Upgrading to PianoTeq Standard: Would this give me enough control over the model to reduce this ringing? I'm not sure it would. Inside the "Design" panel on the demo version of Standard, the "Cutoff" feature can limit high overtones, but this presumably would effect all 88 notes; the Bluethner features "Aliquot strings" for the undamped register; and the Steinway has the "Duplex scale" feature. How far would these features go to reduce ringing above G6# or F6#, versus what can be done in the Pro model? There is a previous thread on this topic that mentions Cutoff and Resonance in particular: https://www.forum-pianoteq.com/viewtopic.php?id=272
3) Upgrading to Pro: Presumably I could then work directly on each of these high notes to reduce ringing??
Any other thoughts/tips? I have also tried wearing the kind of ear plugs that you can wear to concerts, or that professional musicians can wear if they are playing in a loud situation, but they sound awful w/ PianoTeq. I can also reduce the headphone volume, but too little volume really sucks away the lovely bass & midrange in PianoTeq & spoils the realism entirely.