Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Compare sound of DP in real piece (Chopin, Vals N1)

Source - Chopin Vals N1 (MIDI), result - mp3 from different DP (Korg, Yamaha, Casio, Nord) and virtual instruments (Pianoteq, NI and others).
You can hear, compare and select leader:
http://yuri-pavl.com/piano-test

If you want you can post me (yuri.pavl@gmail.com) your own instrument's mp3. We compare not good technic but good sound

Dont worry about rus language in web-page - all need information in english also

interesting

Wow, that's a hard comparison to make. They all sound so different.

Couple of things to note: Not all pianos are available for voting. For example, you can't vote for Vintage D nor Yamaha CLP440. Also it says you can vote for 1 or 2 pianos, but you can actually only vote for one.

It also would be nice if the pianos were all volume normalized. It's very difficult to make quality decisions when volume changes between one and the other. Same principle is true of reverb, although it sounded like these were mostly recorded dry. Also a few had problems with the pedaling, but it appears that that's going to be a major issue in every MIDI comparison we ever do (that involves partial pedal).

And is it just me or are these pianos not all tuned to 440? It's kind of baffling how differently they appear to be tuned.

Having said all that, I was pretty impressed with the CLP440 in this exercise and also TruePianos. Normally I don't think of those as being top shelf sounds but they were good in this exercise. The Korg was also great here. Vintage D was not showcased as nicely here, which I also find surprizing because I really like it in other contexts. Well, I guess there's no perfect piano for everything.

Thanks for creating and posting these.

I listened to a few and came away with the same opinion about these various sounds as I had going in.

They all sound nice in their own way. I am glad I do not have to lock in on one and play exclusively with that sound.

I own several of these sounds and it is very satisfying to just move from one sound to another depending upon what I am playing and the sound I prefer at that time.

I did not vote because I could not justify calling one better than the other. They are just different from one another.

I'd like to send you a mp3 rendered with my Kawai CA 63, but I have a problem. I know how to render and save a mp3 from a midi located in the internal memory, but I don't know how to do it when the midi file is located in a USB memory.

Thanks for sharing your job Yuri, it’s really interesting.

I did not normalize the sound level does not think it is important to understand the nature of sound.
Pay attention to the response on the pedal - some virtual instruments do not understand the half-pedaling and after-pedaling that very much affects the sound.
Also recommend to listen to recordings Nord - they appeared recently, but we have made ​​furror!
As for the voting system (not political ;)) - there are problems with the engine of voting, but I'm sure they'll decide!

I think Nord's Grand Lady D sounds surprisingly good, as I have never been a huge fan of that sample myself. I think the Bosendorfer Imperial sounds too bright personally. The CLP440 sounds great in some areas and too digital in others, but actually overall it sounds the best to me. My vote goes to the CLP440. Great work Yuri. How did you render these on all these different instruments?

supertorpe, unfortunately it is not possible for the CA93/CA63 to convert a MIDI file stored on USB memory to an MP3/WAV file. The 'Convert to Audio' function only works with recorder songs stored in internal memory.

Kind regards,
James
x

Korg SP250 and Casio 330 well below the others - very little timber variation. I found the Korg a little bit better though. Casio just sounds tiny.

Nord - they all sound so bright! Too bright for me. Grand Lady wins though

Yamaha CLP440 - finally a DP piano that gets it right!

Virtual pianos
True Pianos - wow! I'm impressed! I expected far worse! Missing a bit in the piano area compared to the others

Vintage D - it's ok, but I expected better. The forte is not really a forte, short decay. I think it's missing some reverb.

Pianoteq - as always, it's missing the "wood-component" from the piano. It sounds like a recording really really close to the strings, very sharp, but not really enticing.

Fazioli - first of all, I'm not really a fan of the Fazioli, but I respect them because they have a unique, recognizable sound. I found the layer switching a little bit abrupt and resonances at one point that shouldn't be there.. Not really my thing, but I think overall it sounds more convincing that most pianos in this comparison.

Conclusion
Favorites: Korg SV1, Korg SV1 (Deutch Grand), Yamaha CLP440
Second best: True Pianos, Fazioli

ZacharyForbes,
I record my Korg 250, True Pianos and Pianoteq only. Other results I receive from my friends. This research started in our web-forum (Professional Audio Equipment/choice of keyboard instrument [russian] - http://forum.ixbt.com/topic.cgi?id=90:2678) where we are discussing similar problems.

All,
The source file contains a MIDI-record of professional pianist who uses a variety of techniques in the play and pedaling, and allows us to determine the adequacy of the instrument.
I think that these recordings convey more nuanced than any of the videos, especially advertising.
So if you can - you can send your entries for a larger bank to compare (MP3, bitrate >320, yuri.pavl@gmail.com)!

This is a worthy and interesting project. Most of the piano responses sound too damped, do not ring out as expected - clanky. Except the TruePiano. It may have a duller tone but it makes one think more of a human being behind it than a MIDI file.

I've done something similar with another piece, I"ve gathered the MP3s, I have to get around to putting together the web page!

A limitation with this piece is that it consists mostly of quick passages, and many piano flaws are not very noticeable until you play slow, held, legato passages. If the attacks sound good, a piece like this will tend to sound good, but a slower piece with long held notes and chords will require, not just convincing attacks, but convincing post-attack decay regions. And differences would probably be more noticeable in lower keyboard ranges, compared to the higher keyboard range where this piece is focussed. Still, there are useful differences demonstrated in these examples as well!

Funny about the grace notes, how artificial sounding they can be. It makes it sounds like a MIDI sequence rather than a live performance. Probably because they were done with the pairs of notes at identical velocities, which is not how they would be played. It almost sounds like a MIDI loop echo...

Nord Piano 88 Upright Romantic added.

anotherscott,
Recording MIDI performed a professional pianist, but I do not know the details of processing.
As for the demonstration of capabilities, in this play shows the most difficult to reproduce the nuances. Increasing the length of the sample - is the simplest thing can make the manufacturer of DP or virtual instrument. And we see that the virtual instruments with volumes of tens of gigabytes of samples is often inferior to the real instruments with a much more modest!