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Yes, but he seemed kind of excited to see stretching. At least that's how it came across to me.

Maybe because it confirms his valuation of DPs as mostly crappy sounding...

Ah...

Why on earth did I contribute to this then!

Goofball, I'm hearing something like reverb in the file - right at the very beginning where the level setting notes play. Do you know if there is any way to turn that off?

Because it's helpful to see how the subjective sound of a piano is build on a technical base, at least for some aspects of the sound. It can help you to focus on parts of the sound to check if you can hear artefacts or some other things that might annoy you after some time. So this is a good resource for people who intend to buy a DP. But nevertheless, it can never replace playing several DPs by yourself. That should be the ultimate decision base for buying a DP.

Oh, not too excited - just giving you some info from what I saw in the preliminary inspection. It also fails the silent note replay test. The decays are nice and long.

The reverby thing is making it difficult to assess sympathetic resonance though.

Not sure...that's the standard stock patch after a reset to factory settings. It's the piano you get when you first turn on the machine.

Having said that, I'll try to see what I can do, but it would entail editing the patch.

Hey dewster,

Here's Galaxy's newest piano, the "Vintage D":

http://www.mediafire.com/file/z41jjanzjmn/dp_bsd_v1.5_galaxy_vintage_d.mp3

I got it the other day and am enjoying it a lot. To my ears, it's a very nice sounding piano. I used the default patch which already had the Release Samples and "Overtones" (Sympathetic String Resonance) turned on. I did turn on the Damper noises but didn't change any levels. No other settings were changed so this is the "out-of-the-box" sound.

If you can disable just the reverb that would be great.

Nice levels and I don't hear any obvious reverb, so that's good. No looping or stretching, though it fails the pedal down silent replay test. I see at least 7 or 8 velocity layers in there, nicely blended over the midrange, but I can hear steps at the low and high ends. I'll get on it today.

Thanks much!!

Okay, here's the new S90xs Natural Grand S6 again, without (hopefully) any reverb. I'm still learning this board and it was actually quite easy to turn it off. If it was a snake, it would have bit me.

I deleted the other file and uploaded this one:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/hcymzmtnwyg/dp_bsd_v1.5_yamaha_s90xs_natural_grand_s6.mp3

Dewster,

I want to public ally acknowledge your work on this product and apologize for my skepticism early on. It was my contention that very few folks would be interested in or understand your work. I was wrong. In 36 days you have garnered 510 posts on this ambitious thread and project. Of those I counted nearly 50 individuals who contributed.

Clearly, folks that lurk the digital part of the Forum are not the norm of the typical digital piano shopper. I still contend that the bulk of buyers are little inclined to be interested or to absorb your date and conclusions. However, you have proven up a material number of folks in a concentrated period of time who do. Keep up the good work.

Maybe the next step is to query techs from the manufacturers and present your findings asking them to comment re. the context of their product specification postings. Perhaps there may be something in their methodology that you might be missing. Perhaps they may have gotten ahead of their corporate selves in their claims. My guess is the reality lies somewhere in between.

From my perspective as a salesman representing the product, the company reporting 3X sampling or 4X sampling is not going to cost me a nickel. What might cost us all a bunch is for manufacturer’s presentations of specifications to be proven false and misleading on a large scale. From a practical perspective I would opt for the truth, even if their “technology” takes a quantum leap backward.

Marty

Ahh, much better, thanks!!

Yamaha S90 XS Natural Grand S6 Review

Goofball Jones was kind enough to post an DPBSD MP3 of the Natural Grand S6 patch from a brand new Yamaha S90 XS - thanks Goofball!

The attack sample length isn't too bad, though the low notes in particular could benefit from a bit longer loops. The velocity layering sounds pretty smooth, but not quite as smooth as other DPs these days are doing. Up to the first and only audible velocity switch at vel=46, I couldn't hear much in the way of timbre change with increase in velocity, but after that the timbre did noticeably brighten with increased velocity.

During the partial pedal test I noticed the looping "echo" sound was more pronounced, perhaps due to an enhancement of the high frequency content, or perhaps due to whatever process they are using to make the partially damped note decay faster.

The noise floor is fairly white (sounds like a hiss) which always makes analysis much easier. Except for the WAV => MP3 conversion, this recording was done 100% with the instrument (MIDI => WAV) - a convention and convenience I hope soon becomes the norm.

I screen grabbed a bunch of pix of the analysis, and the MP3 is in the usual place should anyone want to see / hear the test results.

I've also performed some maintenance on the picture directory - subfolders were added for the various manufacturers, and all the pictures associated with particular instruments now have their own dedicated zip archives.

---------------------------------
- Yamaha S90xs Natural Grand S6 -
---------------------------------
FILE & SETUP:
- dp_bsd_v1.5_yamaha_s90xs_natural_grand_s6.mp3
- USB Flash drive (MIDI file), USB Flash drive (WAV file), Audacity (normalize to -1dB, MP3)
PROS:
- Passes the pedal down sympathetic resonance test.
- Nice long decays on the order of Pianoteq.
- Realistic key-up "clunk" and string damp "buzz" sound.
- Responds to partial pedaling.
- Appears to be a somewhat blended 3 layer sample set.
- Decent dynamic range (~32dB, vel=1:127).
CONS:
- No obvious pedal up/down samples.
- Partial pedal sympathetic resonance test sounds echoy and loopy (due to HF EQ?).
- Fails the pedal down silent replay test @ pedal up.
- Fails the key down sympathetic resonance test.
- Obviously looped, both visually and audibly.
- Low loops sound fair, mid loops sound loopy, high loops sound slightly static.
- Loop lengths are rather short.
- Sample lengths are (C2:C9): 3.8,3.9,3.3,2.9,2.9,?,?,? seconds.
- Loop lengths are (C2:C9): 0.75,0.68,0.56,0.65,?,?,?,? seconds.
- Obviously stretched, both visually and audibly.
- Stretching is visible over the entire range, audible over the lows and mids.
- Stretch distances: 2(x8),3,2(x3),3,2,2,1,2(x3),1,1,2(x3),1,2(x20) = 45 groups.
- No audible timbre change up to first velocity switch, blended (with filter?) after that.
- Visible velocity layer switch @ vel=46,104.
- Audible velocity layer switch @ vel=46.
OTHER:
- Interestingly, notes played @ vel=1 produce no sound.
- MP3 levels: peak @ -1dB, noise floor @ -73dB.
- Date reviewed: 2010-03-10

Good job dewster.

That Mediafire folder is gradually filling up.

How are your web programming/design skills?
Given the amount of data contained within this thread, I would strongly recommend setting up a dedicated website similar to (or perhaps even partnering with) PurgatoryCreek.

What do you think?

Cheers,
James
x

Why thank you very much Marty. I think we just got off on the wrong foot. I want to apologize for my earlier sharp remarks to you, please forgive me.


The Yamaha claims cited elsewhere here could be just poor translation, or overzealous marketing, who knows, but it does seem heavily biased in their favor. Everyone tells me the manufacturers watch these threads, so maybe pointing it out as kawaian has done is sufficient.

But in general I think this stuff is considered too secret for manufacturers to discuss openly with outsiders. The ironic part is that, with only a few notable exceptions, everyone's been doing pretty much the same thing since the first Kurzweil K250 rolled off the assembly line - with minor improvements here and there of course.

Good suggestion. Someone here actually set up a wordpress site for me to test, and it was quite slick & functional. It was hard to turn that offer down, but I'm not sure I want to pay for website hosting and have them collect ad revenue off of my content. At least I think that's how it works. I wasn't quite ready at that point for a full-blown blog either (not sure I am now, actually). I've thought of the Purgatory Creek angle too, but haven't actually contacted them to see what's what.

Do you know where I can keep lots of ~10MB files for free and link directly to them without ads and such popping up? My ISP (Verizon) allocates a rather tiny storage space, which is fine for my personal web page, but is nowhere near enough for the DPBSD project files.

dewster, I'm afraid I don't of any ad-free hosting that allows direct linking to files. You could of course rely on one of the many file hosting sites such as MediaFire or even dropbox etc. but I expect you'd rather keep everything in a single, reliable location, right?

How about contacting Frank (owner of PianoWorld) or Alden (author of the DP supplement to Piano Buyer)? Actually, the latter would be ideal - yep, definitely shoot Alden a PM.

Good luck!

Cheers,
James
x

http://www.box.net gives you 1GB of storage for free and it doesn't have all those annoying popups. I may be worth checking out. I'm sure there are others but I've linked a bunch of files from there and it's worked out quite well. It also allows you to stream them without downloading.

Well dewster if you don't find a service I can offer you 2GB free webspace on my dedicated webserver for the project. If interested, just contact me by PM.