Sound level (loudness) of the pianos what were modelled

My suggestion is, if you’ve two (2) microphones (a matched pair), use them (in a recording of your acoustic piano) and match the recording setup to a Pianoteq piano model closest to your own (referenced) piano.

Choose or create, simply a Pianoteq virtual microphone placement to simulate your real world one!

You probably want to experiment with some softwares that emulate real world microphones, if although you’ve no physical mics matched inside Pianoteq, you’re really still serious and want to get quite the best possible results outside your own piano room.

I overlooked this post, apologies lo134.

Yes, definitely agree with peterws says. A grand is loud up close.

Even the most beautiful ones can certainly hurt your ears played long enough. It's a quality reason to use a smaller piano mostly at home or in practice with the lid down often (IRL that can take away a lot of treble which might be the first area of hearing damage to show up).

Gladly Pianoteq can be turned down where a real grand can't (we keep the grand sound but don't need it 100% real volume all day/night). Our neighbours are as happy about this as I am

It's a thing worth considering - if you do intend to play at realistic volumes, please do always care for your ears and keep it to a play-through, or performance at a time, but definitely do limit the times at full volume. For me, the suspension of disbelief is enough at around 70 to 80 dB so hoping others might feel OK at that range too. At very least, hope that helps you save your hearing - you have pretty golden ears judging by your lovely work with the Bluthner!

Also - keep in mind a grand is by nature projecting sound waves to fill a large space - so as beautiful as they can sound loud, putting one in a small physical space may not sound as good up close as one on an acoustically appropriate stage (but in headphones and in recordings of course very fine coming out 2 speakers - but maybe just not for the purposes of player positional realism - if that makes sense.) Small spaces among other things can include big thumping early reflections among other things subjected to high bassy audio. So, some tweaking of presets might be a good thing to get to grips with. A few quick thoughts, include lowering 'early reflection' in reverb, altering reverb 'tone', using an EQ preset or making one to reduce some bass. That's before getting to other issues like running things through a DAW of choice and using some plugins gain a studio level of control over more aspects of your sound.

I suppose you will require your sound system to achieve over 100dB (with realism as goal). Depending on your budget, you could go for horns or speakers (new or used). To me, with speakers size does count (realism). Small close ones may sound OK for practice etc.. but you will struggle to recreate something sounding realistic in your space (esp. grand fortissimo). For most people I believe stereo speakers above 8inch can give reasonable 'suspension of disbelief' in a comfortable range.. adding a sub-woofer can be a fairly simple step up.

There are some really helpful forum members like dklein (a decent fellow) has interesting posts here about his setup and future setup ideas. There are many forum threads about multi-speaker setups. Such as, in addition to stereo speakers, using others pointing upwards, pointing outwards. I haven't made a dedicated setup like it (have done much work with speakers though) but can imagine, you'd want to move your excellent Yamaha controller back from the wall if possible and position speakers around the virtual area of the body in various directions - and you could perhaps decide on those directions based on the virtual microphones inside the microphone panel.

Like most of these kinds of things, there's no absolutely correct way to do it - but the journey is half the fun - definitely post back as you make your choices, I'm sure there are some excellent ideas on other threads and some members with their own experiences in making similar rigs.

If you wish to spare no expense there are many interesting audio systems which you could collect up into quite a studio. If budget is tight there could be some really good used speakers you might be able to purchase. If recording/monitoring/mixing/etc. you might want to bite on some newish flat monitors, but if you're most interested in playing in the moment, maybe some large used speakers could be ideal.

If you think of a few particular things to point to for help, I'm pretty confident someone will know where you're up to and know of a solution.

I'm looking forward to more of your videos and any more questions you'd like to post on your setup. Cheers.

Interesting stuff Bruno.

Sorry to hear it (<<edit - un-intended pun there aah) - that's definitely along the lines I was posting about.

Probably quite a few long term headphone wearing dpiano players might find it interesting to swap their headphones around L&R <to> R&L. It may sound quite strange at first and hopefully for most it's just a novel thing to try but long term exposure to quite different signals left and right might result in hearing changes, whether physical or temporal. I try to mix up the use of B/A and A/B settings and audience perspective too but a lot of people will prefer B/A for realism's sake.

Not to give the impression it's all about danger though just worth considering in any audio setting where high volume is a component.

Hoping lo134 is getting on well with his project.

Hi lo134,

that's good to know.

This probably needs adding to my other post I suppose (not counter to it but a little more dimension):

There's little reason not to have speakers capable of 100+dB if you like (and enjoy it in not grinding long time frames genuine crescendo can be awesome and it may be so inspiring to be able to experience above 80 - most music/playing though might indeed fall to 60 or 80 anyway if headroom is dynamically kind of real and you have great skill with range) - and lucky for us we can always control how loud we run the audio - I mostly still feel near realism at or below 80dB, thankfully or I wouldn't suggest it possible.

Maybe this is worth adding, so you or others maybe don't necessarily aim for smaller speakers or some small speaker array with it's own built in tech (things sounding like Xtra-super space-bassTM or zupa-spacial-XtremeTM processing) - very wary of that kind of thing. It will be better than that, to have a solid 2 speaker (or horns plus sub-woofer) sound system which doesn't struggle to output the higher volumes or use TMgimickery which tries to make small speakers sound bigger, so I'd still definitely suggest aiming for a speaker system comfortably capable of high(er) volumes is all, as it's a point of disappointment, easily avoided. It's not fun to find your system is struggling to make 80dB seem 'real' A system which can easily output more is likely to see you in a sweet spot in terms of physical speaker operation, rather than hearing them near clipping (or hearing speaker cone/coil or other stresses interfering with the tones, or even distortion).

Wishing you the best!