As with NI's work, Roland's and Yamaha's, yes, that's a beautifully, carefully sampled and automated representation of an excellent piano.Uncle E wrote:What do you think of Vienna Imperial Grand? The demos sound like great recordings of great pianos to me.realtrance wrote:Any sampled note is always going to play the same way. Period. No matter how good the layering and velocity switching. You can introduce great variety with such script-based techniques -- Native Instruments' Kontakt pianos are great, thorough, well-researched examples -- but in the end,it's always going to feel, to someone like me, not quite there.
The nice things sometimes about sampled grands is that sometimes you get close to the feel in particular of the extremes, bottom end and very high notes. As with all electronic synthesis, it's very difficult to really capture the physics and resulting sounds at those ends of the spectrum (same is true for recording a real piano for a music performance). A lot is also dependent on the sound system you're outputting on; most headphones/earphones/speakers hit severe limits in these areas, and grand pianos also have a dynamic range that only great audio and professional, practiced microphone placement and use can capture.
That's the thing: you can do a lot of work to get "close" to making up for the fact that, like me, you have neither the money or space for a real piano..... but if you know its sound and feel (and smell, even!).... it'll always be an approximation.
The good thing is the approximations are getting closer to capturing more of the real experience, and it's scientifically valuable to keep evolving the software to try to do same; it's how most synthesis has progressed, historically.
One of the cool things about Pianoteq is that it has clearly had the close involvement of trained piano tuners, and people very familiar with the history of the instrument. If you enjoy tweaking the details, you can really get under the hood (with the full version, of course) and learn all the stuff piano tuners must know to get great sound out of a model.
I distinctly remember there were periods when my "main" piano sounded quite different -- better, or worse! -- depending on how well the piano tuner had done his job that time through. <g> If I'd had more knowledge, I'd have both understood his challenges better, and would have been able to discuss tuning goals with him before a tune.
And, of course, pianos will sound different depending on the weather - humidity, temperature, it affects the physics of the instrument, as well as the transmission of sound in a physical space that is also changed by that same weather, so in fact it's a whole, hugely complex system.
So there is plenty left to do! "FXP file: Pleyel in an 18th century chamber on a rainy autumn day in Boulogne...."
