Hauptwerk and Organteq comparison?

in a nutshell

Hauptwerk offers wet sampling (stereo/surround) of an instrument and its acoustics. It is a sampling-based development platform. There are many independent producers and the quality is very variable, not always satisfying! Currently the sampling library is very large. If the recordings are done well then it is very realistic. In short, the easiest way to capture the reality of that particular place.
Dry sampling is reduced to a few useful cases and has long since been abandoned because it is too complicated to achieve compared to market interest. The semi-dry sampling (with tail truncation) is not as satisfying as a true dry sampling and you probably get a better or comparable result with Organteq without the reverb.

If you are interested in a dry sound then Organteq currently has no sophisticated multi-channel routing management like Hauptwerk. This is important for distributing the allocation of sounds and greatly reducing the intermodulation distortions that result from the digital mix of dry sounds.

In perspective with Organteq you can shape the sound from within with a level of clarity that can be difficult to achieve with microphones. Try to think what you can do with Pianoteq! (Making the parallel with the piano I prefer the Garritan CFX but the level of clarity of Pianoteq is superior)

Many thanks to you both for your replies.   My friend unlike myself is a very accomplished professional pipe organist and academic and  has played numerous European and USA organs.   I have sent him a link to the Organteq webpage and he will soon listen to the demos.   It was him who mentioned Hauptwerk to me.
Ian

I'm a user of Hauptwerk (Advanced version) and Pianoteq 6.  Having now tried the free trial version of Organteq, one major issue for me (amongst many, I'm afraid to say) is maximum polyphony.  As a test, I tried playing Mulet's Tu Es Petra with all stops out (and manuals coupled).  Within the first bar the very unpleasant "distortion" happened due to audio / polyphony overload with the default setting.  I was using a MacBook Pro quad-core i7 from 2016 using built-in audio.  I had to reduce the polyphony to 96! to completely avoid any overload.  A question for Modartt would be "what system / processor is required to handle polyphony of 512 notes?"

To give you another comparison, one of the restrictions of Hauptwerk BASIC edition (v4) is a maximum polyphony of 1024 notes whereas the Advanced edition is unlimited.

Same observation here. Tutti with all couplers engaged is impossible, but then my music PC is quite old and underpowered. For now, I can play tutti not coupling anything just fine. Probably future versions could make use of CPU power more efficiently? Down the road it should be an i7 or i9 I suppose.

Apart from the problems reported by tmyoung which can only solve Modartt, the computing power must be measured in GFLOP but it is the specific physical model that loads the CPU and can be optimized with parallel processing and with optimized instructions found in the new processors (AVX, AVX2, AVX-512, FMAx). The upcoming Hauptwerk version 5 will also use these instructions!
Today's processors have a power of hundreds of GFLOP but with current developments we are beyond the TFLOP (in particular the AMD Zen 2 series up to 64 cores) without considering accelerator cards like Xeon Phi.

For an equal physical modelling comparison, Viscount UNICO series uses up to 8 SHARC processors for a maximum power of about 12 GFLOP. A SHARC DSP are used in embedded systems but are a hundred times less powerful than a current Intel / AMD processor.

With the old Intel CPU you could have these performances:
Processor                             Brief Spec                                Linpack (GFLOPS)
Dual Xeon E5 2687W              16 cores @ 3.2GHz AVX              345
Core i7 5930K (Haswell E)      6 cores @ 3.5GHz AVX2             289
Dual Xeon E5 2650                 16 cores @ 2.0GHz AVX              262
Core i7 4770K (Haswell)          4 cores @ 3.5GHz AVX2            182

Interesting. In other words, if tmyoung is onto something there that can and probably will be fixed in a future update, my modest AMD A8 Fusion (4 cores at 2.9 GHz) could last another round or two of updates (HW 5, OrganTeq).

I do not need large dispositions to toy with. So far, the free Paramount 3/10 has lasted my TO musings, and the OrganTeq model is perfect for my modest practice duties. Love the sound and quick boot. I toyed with GO and the excellent free sample sets, but never liked the long boot times of any of the sample sets. Also, OrganTeq might be finally the solution to use it at church (old digital Baldwin) using my MacBook (i5).

A quality audio board and good ASIO driver apparently will also help the CPU load. I just played around with the two boards (both consumer grade), and the Xonar definitely is helping to the point that OrganTeq is almost glitch free now. Not completely, but to the point I can neglect a CPU upgrade for some time to come.

...thanks for the information, Modartt has obviously sized the computing power with modern CPUs. Keep in mind that Intel i9 9900k is a powerful 8 cores 5GHz cpu with AVX2 support.

It may be more practical to have a high-end CPU comparison with the following link:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

My system does fine with 512 polyphony.  Intel Core i7-6900K @ 3.2 GHz, 8 cores.  Good ASIO Sound-Card by RME.

I tried that and my Duo-Capture EX instead of the built-in. Same result for me...
I suppose you know that pipe organs (especially mechanical ones) have huge latency so a larger buffer is actually more realistic here.

Running at Buffer 256, nominal latency 5.3 ms which feels about right for Pipe Organ.  The extra Cores (8 in my system) probably help a lot.

For sure, you have twice as many cores that I do! That would definitely help with Organteq.

Yep that's a slow CPU.

In fact, with all stops enabled, the maximum polyphony of 512 is quickly reached without audio problem (playing quickly + putting the 2 elbows on the keyboard - not very comfortable nor harmonious - ...) Organteq indicates a consumption of resources between 60 to 67%, the task manager 32%, with a CPU frequency (average?) Of 4,67Ghz [my laptop is configured in performance mode, but in fact constrained by its power supply and the automatic mode of management of the fan, that I do not wish to see too noisy, voluntarily not forced to the maximum, and deliberately no configuration of CPU overclocking mode, the maximum theoretical frequency of 5Ghz processor 2 cores is not reached here] On 16 cores (8 cores / 16 simultaneous threads) 14 have a significant activity, of which 1 to 80%, 6 to 50% approximately) By playing "normally" (even with all stops enabled) the fans remain silent, 8% of the CPU power is requested according to task manager, rarely more than 17% of resources indicated by Organteq)
Bruno

For a long time, I've always wanted the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X but it's expensive

If I had to make a better compromise on the price of the processor, I would certainly be interested in the Rizen 5 3600:
see https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp...mp;id=3481
* Performances already very high ON 1 ONLY thread (essential for Organteq / Pianoteq because there is always a logical core which works much more than the others and is in fact the limiting factor)
* Number of logical core sufficient (here 12) including 6 physical, I found that Organteq (idem Pianoteq) does not use all the cores with 16 logical core for example.
* TDP not too important (here 65W): can find a motherboard at a more moderate price, and especially to run the fans slower (.. it is still interesting to hear a little more the instrument rather that the machine, especially with open headphones ...)

// In addition, I just used my 2nd Organteq slot on a smaller Dell laptop recently purchased, which has an Intel Core i5 9300H processor (8 logical core, 4 physical)
link: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp...mp;id=3448 .The default max polyphony: 160, works perfectly (use on the same external dac and my keyboard casio GP500) mode "tutti" (all stops) I can put elbows on the keyboard without problems without saturating the processor. The maximum level of polyphony that can be used (except bends on the keyboard) is 256, a polyphony that can actually be achieved with about 90% of CPU resources used with Organteq. In practice the consumption of resources is between 25 and 40% according to the indicator of Organteq playing "normally", in "tutti" mode. (My Dell laptop which originally had 8GB of RAM had been upgraded to 16GB for a few dozen euros of RAM bar - probably useless for Organteq)

Bruno