Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Does anyone already tried Ivory II...

Hi,

I'm about to buy a Virtual Piano keyboard to be used on my year 2001 Yamaha U1 Silent piano that will be delivered this tuesday (Yeah!!!). I listened to many samples and I recently downloaded the pianoteq demo. I must say that I like the program. It's fast, you can adjust many parameters, and the sound is ok for me as I will only use it with my headphones on. I especially like the possibility of all the dynamic levels (I guess it has to do with velocity or so. There are 127 possibilities to play from really soft to really loud) which is so important for expressive playing.

I'm still in doubt however with the Ivory grand pianos. I like the samples but the old version has however only 10 samples to express the dynamics. It seems not a lot to me. In the new one it is expanded and has 16 in the Ivory II version. I can however find almost no other information about it. Even on the Synthogy site they only offer the old version. Just some press releases in which they claim to be so good. But i love to have some "real" opinions out of experience. I did saw it on sales in my hometown however, but the store owners couldn't tell a lot about it. So I was wondering if someone of you is already using it, and what their experiences are. If they can say something about it in comparison with pianoteq and if My macbook pro 2,66 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 GB internal memory is sufficient to use it without problems.

Thanks...

Strange. because Ivory II has not been released yet on the Synthogy's website. Where did they get it.

Ivory II should be a heavy hard disk demanded software, so you may have to take a look at you Macbook's hard drive speed. 7200rpm disk is a good choice. However the SSD can boost the performance even further, they are expensive too(160GB Intel SSD takes 429 USD or CAD).

Hope this can help.

I don't know... Seems it is out here in Europe. The old version is for sale now. The website says it's new in store.

http://www.feedback.nl/computer-software/synthogy/ivory-ii-grand-piano

They've got all versions (grandpiano, upright and italian grand). And a decent price as well. That's why I was wondering if anyone had some previous experience with Ivory II.

I believe that website must be for pre-order. Synthogy has not released Ivory II yet. It has been demonstrated at things like winter NAMM and I'm sure there are some beta testers.

What leads you to suggest that 10-level sampling is not enough?

There may be a misconception here. The number of sample levels does not equate to the number of volume levels that a note can be played at. The number of volume levels is equal to the number of velocity levels. The samples are distributed across these velocity levels and in general, not evenly distributed. It is not unusual to have only 2-4 samples per note and so 10 levels seems to me like a lot. I don't have golden ears, but I would guess that the difference between 10 level sampling and 16 level sampling has a lot more to do with marketing than with audio fidelity.

But I invite people to set me straight ;-)

I agree completely.

I agree partially. Having 16 (or more) individual samples per note gives you access to MUCH more than just volume levels. For example, you also get the overtones that occur naturally when the string is struck harder. You won't get that just by cranking up the amplitude of a lower level sample in which these may not have occurred. And in that area where a particular sample is being increased in volume to the level where the next sample is at, and this next sample now has these overtones in it, you will hear a drastic change in the tone of that note rather than a subtle, natural transition.

Subtle things, indeed.

Yes, of course you are correct, Curt88. If velocity were equated only to amplitude then one sample level would be sufficient. At 4 sample levels, even I can hear the switching, but for me it is already subtle and if this were doubled to 8 sample levels, I'm sure I could not hear it, certainly not in a blind test.

In re-reading your post, it occurred to me that when additional samples are added, they are probably used mostly to more finely divide the high velocity region rather than being added throughout the whole range.

I am very surprised. I checked a Dutch website and it seems it's really for sale now. I'll check this afternoon in the store itself. If it's really there, I'll buy it.

Please report back here, I am also eagerly waiting for the release :-)

Hey James, have you actually tried out the SSD with Ivory or other VP's? I have always wondered whether SSD would improve these but didn't want to spend the money to find out myself. Thanks if you can confirm.

I will get my SSD (Crucial C300 64 GB) tomorrow. Reading speeds of 320 MB/S (SATA 600 GBPS), so that should greatly improve the performance. Will post on experience here

Please keep in mind that WIN XP does not play well with SSD's.

I have Win 7 (x64) which natively supports trim, AHCI will be activated

This is where the judgement of the engineer who made the sample set comes to play and the reason players can't agree which is best.

For one style of music finder gradation between pp, p and ppp mattr more than fine division between f and fff. If you style is is soft you'd not harw about the velicity samples you never use.

I think the Alica Keys sample library has thefinder division near the "p" end of the velocity as that matcher her style best and the sample set was made just for her "sound".

You really can't win. If you spread the steps out evenly the steps are large. If you make them finer in one place you make then thinner in another. If you simply use brute force and record 30 steps the size is huge and quality control is harder

Some sample sets try and be smarter and use more velocity layers in the pitch ranges you play and fewer near the ends of the keyboard. There is no reason foer every note sto have the same number of samples

It the end, I'm sure we will all be playing hybrid systems that use modelling and samples and there will be no layers.

I use Galaxy Vintage D, which is not a high demanded software. Beside my SSD, my desktop has 8GB RAM and Quad Core CPU.
I have the library and Kontakt 4 player on the SSD, together with my WIN7 64Bit and other daily used software, like CS5 and lightroom3.
The loading speed is noticeable faster than the time I load them both from my Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB Hard disk. If I have to give the number I'd say it's double the loading speed.
However, like I mentioned, Vintage D is not a high demanded software, it only has 5GB library data, and the memory usage is around 230MB. Most 7200rpm disk will handle it very well.
I will try the Ivory II in the future, but, until it is released I have nothing to do run the test.

I seem to recall there was a guy posting here who'd recorded his own sample set with an electro-magnetic setup where he could control the velocity precisely. I wonder whether that would work for the really large sample sets.

Pianowave have done this (not for very large samplesets though), according to this thread: http://www.northernsounds.com/forum...ated-Piano-Library-Kalamkarian-Bechstein

Greg.

Has anyone called that dutch store, which supposedly has Ivory II (see above?)
I can unfortunately not speak nederlands