Pianoteq setup for the DGG classical recording sound

I wouldn't discount the interpretation or performance elements here.

You are directly comparing performances from world class professional classical musicians recorded in ideal real rooms to a completely synthesized instrument in a virtual room played by someone who is likely to be a highly capable musician but a jobbing jack of all trades too. In some cases maybe some of the parts are programmed in too, rather than played.

Pianoteq is very, very good and IMHO much better at conveying those  human performance elements than any other virtual piano technology but it's not real.

Is your performance up to comparison?
Do you have the best graded hammer action you could possibly afford, and the best technique at the fingers?

Taking your performance out of the equation-
Standard and Pro allow you to adjust the microphone positions. A lot can be done there to get the sound much closer to your favoured recording.

A lot can be done adjusting the reverb and EQ too - in all three versions.

Hammer hardness in Standard and Pro. Lots of factors.

External reverb FX and all kinds of other tricks can be done to modify the sound to your taste.

AFAIK, the DG recordings are mastered very intensively, a lot of thought for each frequency at each intensity. Mastering, in a word! You can do the same thing in Pianoteq (Pro) but obviously it won't come instantly.

Yes, all of that.  I’m using the Steinway D setup.  I've tried reverb parameters and mic position.

I used to record classical professionally and know something about mic positions and the lore.
https://www.marlboromusic.org/recording...n/id-2579/
I took a class from RCA producer Max Wilcox and knew him and took symphony mic-position pointers from him at Marlboro.

And I have access to some pure gold private MIDIs recorded by a world class concert pianist.

It's not hard to get a great recording of a great player on a great piano in a great room with readily-available mics and other tech.  But I have found it very hard, impossible with the Pianoteq app.  There is some software I want to write to demonstrate musical expression, and Pianoteq seems the only option.

My question remains. 

This would be the case in a perfect world! I have also recorded dozens of CDs of classical music, and very often solo piano, and not all the elements are necessarily always available, believe me. A room is never perfect. A Steinway D (or B) is never perfect. Microphones are never perfect. Even pianists are never perfect, otherwise there should be no editing! ;-)

Yeah, I know where you're coming from. I do a lot of educational music, and I've found it an epic struggle to find a really satisfying sound in Pianoteq that comes across well with very simple material. Somehow the timbre of the middle register is never quite convincing, and the attack sound is not quite there. Things have improved in v8, but I'm still having to settle for 'near enough'. Don't get me wrong, I do love Pianoteq for all sorts of reasons, and I still think it's better than pretty much any of the sample-based offerings out there. I have tried some sample-based pianos, and I always end up thinking 'OK, nice samples, but... ugh, it's so clunky!'

Honestly no. Or not "from the start". But Pianoteq allows you to modify - whenever you want - many things that you could not modify after a "real" recording! And that's a huge difference.
That said, I did a lot of experimenting with the (virtual) positioning of the microphones, and I was amazed by the big difference in sound... too good to be true? I don't know.

It appears that there are *a lot* of folks who *very strongly* dislike the sound of Pianoteq. You will not find them here, though, for obvious reasons.

Some of them want to like Pianoteq because the software checks all boxes (small footprint, very nice interface, lots of options conveniently laid out rather than the "holy mess" of Kontakt and friends). But they don't like the sound. They have given Modartt some feedback, but it has been too "generic" such as "it sounds nasal", or "it lacks body", "chords are not natural-sounding", "it does not sound like a piano" and so on, hence the developers have not been able to understand the problem. Most of these people share the same sentiment regardless of the amplification and speaker/headphone they use. This last observation led me to conclude that is not a simple EQ issue.

To some other people, Pianoteq sounds like a recording of an acoustic piano.

Very rarely, somebody is in between (that's me): can hear that is different (in some cases very different) from the recording of an acoustic piano, but it's at least decent, and occasionally good (sadly sometimes is also bad). I bought it and I'm happy with the purchase, but it really makes me mad that I don't understand why sometimes is good and sometimes it's not!

I know at least one of the "haters", a pianist who actually worked with Modartt as a "beta tester" and provided lots of feedback trying to improve the sound -- to no avail.

I speculate that both the physical ability to hear the sound and perhaps some psychological idea of "paying more attention" to some aspects of the sound is the culprit of this love/hate split. I suspect that the developers themselves are in the obvious camp in which they are not able to hear (or not able to pay attention) to the thing(s) that bother(s) some.

Let me nudge you to reach out to the developers: I think with your recording background and the ability to hear at least some problems as you described, you can be a great helper for them to understand what the problem is. Even if they can't hear it, they can measure it: some of them also have a recording background so you'd speak a similar, if not same, language -- unlike the pianist without any sound engineering expertise I mentioned above. And you can hear the problem for them. You could help making the product much better, which you may enjoy more, and they may reward you with freebies or even cash.

I've found their user support really responsive, both before and after I purchased the software. Start here: https://www.modartt.com/support (and check your spam folder if you don't hear back in a couple of business days).

Let us know how it goes, even if it ends in nothing, because I'm really curious (no need to share the nitty-gritty technical and perhaps proprietary details, just the big picture).

I don't know of a silver bullet. I'm more considering shaping the sound into something you like, not a solution that magically takes Pianoteq from say 90% realistic to 95%, just an enjoyable tone that you like more.
The engine is what it is and it's superb, it isn't perfect though. Pianoteq can very often sound totally real and at other times I think it sounds synthetic in some way - then again I will hear an old recording from the 60s say and the piano tone is synthetic in a similar way! - classical recordings are false and mere stereo simulacrum too. I think there is an expectation bias at play. Also sometimes the brain picks up on the false elements in the sound and exaggerates them in our imagination.

Sometimes I can enjoy a real recorded piano. Other times I find recordings false and annoying. A really wide spread out stereo piano can sometimes really irritate me - especially when it's not a solo piano recording.  Other times the same recording I'm not so bothered. When analysing plugin presets that's bound to get even worse. It's like when you spend too much time mixing you can no longer judge the sound accurately any more and you have to take a break.

For a low cost have a play with ARverb. Currently $19 in the sale. 
https://arverb.com/
Have a play with Liquidsonics reverbs too.

Mostly external reverbs are for mxing multiple instruments together though. You already have good sounding tools within Pianoteq.

ARverb demos sound really good, thanks.

So many great (and different) algorithmic reverbs out there but at that price it's well worth adding this one too for anyone that uses Pianoteq in a DAW.

It can do a believable hall sound but it's a very short reverb compared to normal competition, so it's not an ideal Pop/ambient music FX reverb, just dedicated to sounding realistic when gluing instruments in a virtual room space when dialled in properly - which is easy as it's quite a simple tool.

Properly micing pianos is very hard indeed. To the point that you’re far more likely to end up with a better sound using Pianoteq than with a real miced piano.

Using Pianoteq in a DAW with a good reverb is worthwhile, as is limiting the velocity range to under 120, say 117 (instead of the max 127). 

127 is like hitting a real piano as hard as possible, which isn’t how you’d be playing. This could avoid the metallic sound some don’t like. Depends on how you’ve calibrated your keyboard I guess. If you have to hit really hard to get 127, great.

For external reverbs you can get a lot for free these days:

Acon verberate basic

Impulses to be loaded in a convolution reverb:
https://www.grantnelson.co/article/1/le...-responses
https://samplicity.com/bricasti-m7-impu...nse-files/

Free convolution reverbs:
https://www.meldaproduction.com/MConvolutionEZ
https://www.bestservice.com/en/halls_of...50%20years
https://impulserecord.com/project/convology-xt-plugin/

Epic plate and reverb: https://varietyofsound.wordpress.com/downloads/

Valhalla supermassive plus some free presets:
https://howardsmithsounds.com/free-pres...ve-v2-0-0/
https://solidtrax.nl/product/earth-stars/
https://audiovoltage.com/montrose/

Adding at the end of the audio chain some nice EQ like a tube emulation one (Rule Tec heritage for example, not free) can help, plus stuff like a tube effect - tube2 from Airwindows is good (donationware).

For reverbs I’d also use the Abbey Road trick and control what the reverb processes. Typically nothing under 200Hz or above 5KHz is what I do.

Which is why I linked a bunch of presets that make it sound more like a great normal algorithmic reverb

All good - anyway I put in there many that are really good for realistic spaces. But I added supermassive because it’s gotten me out of a jam several times where the usual suspects wouldn’t work.

It was unexpected but it worked amazingly well.

For real room sound, the Acon one plus the convolution ones with the right impulses would be the ticket.

But sometimes we think we want a realistic room sound, and in the end what we end up liking (and what works better with the sound source) may be something altogether different

A favorite trick: convolution reverb feeding an algorithmic one.

This TY video recently "debunked" the Abbey Road trick "myth" concluding putting EQ pre or post reverb makes no difference.  I pushed back in a comment (Joseph Merrill) with some gentle skepticism based on it seeming to matter to my ears and the limited number of test cases used in the video.  I did a search on if reverberation creates any frequency content that is not there, even if you measure impulse responses inside a piano.  According to what I found reverberation, even in a piano, adds no new frequency content, which I found surprising but not shocking.  Still not completely convinced either way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UqSEOd...tionExpert

I notice the Pianoteq mic tool lets you send the output of up to 5 mics to separate channels.  By default it seems most piano models have the mics routed to stereo channels.  One thing to try would be to send them all to separate channels, or two sets of stereo channels and do some separate processing.  This would be additional to any mic adjustments you think you can make to make it sound better. 

In a real world recording you can get a lot out of position and angle, manipulating the phase in a good way to enhance results.  Anyone get the sense that angle and position of mics is resulting in the phase relationships your ear expects?   I never really recorded live acoustic instruments so I can't really say.

It’s an incredibly common piece of advice for reverbs. And I don’t use the same EQ. My settings are 200Hz-5KHz or so in LX480, then at the main out (not the reverb out, but the actual master buss) I do the gentle highpass at 50Hz.

Anyway whether you EQ the input to the reverb or the reverb’s output (which is what I think the video tries to prove) isn’t the point.

The point is one shouldn’t apply reverb to the whole frequency spectrum all the time - that’s the essence of the “trick”.

I notice a lot of the preset mic positions include ones placed right in the piano, often cardioids.  Pulling them out seems to declog the thickness a bit.  Shortened up the reverb as well, a mixed little drier and I liked it better.  When you look at default Pianoteq mic placements any general advice on adjustments compared to what you're seeing in presets?

Not necessarily something I'd recommend for a fidelity situation but I also find that reverbs will sit better with a dry track if I put the reverb on a separate channel and do weird transformations on the way in that skew toward adventurous.  You get two benefits: quite weird effects but kind of hiding which is sort of like a best of two extremes, and the transformations pre-reverb seem to get the reverb and the dry signal out of each others' way.  If I do weird stuff on the way into a reverb, the reverb channel end up 100% wet or rather close to 100% wet.  This was like the one use I had for Waves Enigma for example.  The normal issue with reverb is it's a copy of a timing-blender version of the same frequencies and then you just add them back together.  EQing helps but modulation effects, things that tweak the frequencies, can also help them be complimentary textures.

I don’t have any to offer.  Everything I’ve tried is unsatisfying.  My hope was/is that there is someone here who has something interesting.

Oh, that is so disappointing, but somehow it doesn't surprise me. I've given up trying to do my own mic settings because I got so frustrated over the fine adjustments. I came to the conclusion that my time was better spent making music rather than messing around with virtual mics.