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So you're happy to tell us that our wildest dreams are within your scope to deliver but you're going to deny us?

It's a bit like when the counter assistant says "I'm afraid we've just sold the last one". I don't really want to know.

dire tonic, "...registry hack..." as in regedit and Windows Registry? Yuck!! Boo!!

- isn't it about time the V-piano mob (all four of them?) had their own sub-forum? No one else takes this seriously, surely?

Where's the problem?

DT, Hah! Yes I know how to solve the problem.... but I ain't gonna tell you!

Concerning the registry hack.... well known that if you mess up the registry Windows goes KaBoom (in strange and every so subtle ways... or not). Not for the faint of heart, and certainly not highly recommended.

The Liverpool Philharmonic Hall was world renowned for having excellent acoustics. They say it was uncomfortable - with wooden benches rather than seats, but approaching perfection for the music lover (or even audiophile ). When it burned to the ground in the 1930's, my mother said that, when she went into school the next day, the music teacher was sobbing at the piano, during the morning assembly.

They tried and tried to reproduce the acoustic qualities of the place, even copying the fixtures and fittings of the wooden benches, but it never was very successful. In the end, they built an cavernous art deco building which is now grade II listed, despite being a bit of an ugly monstrosity.

But it makes you wonder where the magic was, in the original hall, and where it ended up as the whole lot went up in smoke on the fateful evening of 5 July 1933.

There seem to be as many perspectives on the DP market as there are people involved, whether customers or those creating the product. I would not be at all surprised if engineers behind the product feel frustrated by limitations imposed by marketing, for example, because this is very common with many products (rather than because of anything particular about DP manufacturing).

With customers, there are many who are perfectly satisfied with today's console models and will probably hang on to and use their current purchases for a long time to come. Then, there are those who want to tinker, being either just curious as to what can be done or because they are dissatisfied with what is currently available.

I purchased Pianoteq last summer when v 5 came out. I intended to use it with my Casio PX-5S. I used it with my i7 Ultrabook, using SSD (though not really an issue with Pianoteq as it woudl be with a large sample library). It worked fine, but I really don't want a bunch of stuff connected together to make a workable DP. My setup consisted of my DP, my Ultrabook, and a pair of powered monitors (Roland CM-30).

When the V-Grand came along, my wife decided she wanted to reward me for having worked so many years, paying off the mortgage, putting us through school, taking care of her medical bills, and putting together a workable retirement, while keeping us completely out of debt. If there is anything special about the V-Grand to me beyond what the product may offer, it is my wife's involvement and reasons for getting it.

I am one of those customers who wants it all in one box. I deal with computers every day (I came out of retirement to do some contract engineering with my wife's recent trip to the Mayo Clinic and more to come) and would rather make music on something resembling a musical instrument. This is personal preference and not a reflection on whether other solutions are viable/good/bad/etc. We each must choose what we want to work with, and such decisions have little to no bearing on what somebody else chooses to do. I feel that the market is large enough to offer most people something.

I do think the state of the art with DPs will continue to improve, and acknowledge that it has been improving all along, though I realize that is not in agreement with some others here. I am fine with that, and hope they are too. We don't all have to agree on everything.

Due to my embedded engineering experience, I could talk about the nuts and bolts of this technology too, but choose not to. I would rather focus on the end product and the fact that today people can aford to buy a decent enough instrument that the average person can enjoy. Maybe the V-Grand is suitable for concerts as in several Youtube videos, and maybe not. I really don't care because it is good enough for me. Same thing with the other models and brands. They are clearly good enough for many, since this is a growing market.

That said, there is always room for improvement and people to push to make that happen. So, discuss away and maybe there will be some positive influence on manufacturers to come out of it. But keep it civil if you expect them to pay attention and listen. Such discussion is not the same as dealing with a pissed off customer whose DP just broke down and left the person frustrated with that situation. I am sure there is frustration on the part of some here about how things could be done better given the technology available today, so I can't ignore that either. All in all, I sincerely hope everybody eventually gets what they want.

Tony

toddy, that is a pretty sad story and most unfortunate. It speaks to the multitude of factors (some of which I am sure we do not understand) that contribute to the listening experience.

- like some auto-activities might make you go blind?

Don't believe everything your parents told you. I've been all over my registry for the last 10 years without so much as an electron changing orbit.

dt, Hah! and for the last 20+ years, I am the guy they call to fix the damn things. Yes from Windows 3.1....

my sympathies! Seriously, this hack is totally benign - as are almost all hacks involving initial/default setting values for 3rd party software. If it doesn't work you retrace...simples.

In any case, anyone not using Acronis or similar with a PC is taking a needless risk IMO.

A Turing test: yes that's exactly right.

But are we comparing a piano performance, AS HEARD LIVE SITTING IN A CONCERT HALL, to a sampled or modelled (pure synthetic) piano sample (as in the Debussy) AS HEARD THROUGH LOUDSPEAKERS? Is that the Turing test?

IF SO then the difference will be obvious, and the test will be failed, for sure. The sample pushing out sound THROUGH LOUDSPEAKERS will always be trumped by the sound of a piano heard directly, without speakers. Speaker technology isn't there yet. AT ALL. (Quite apart from all the other issues inherent in the example: touch, let-off, hammer weight, tuning, etc...)

But (as in the original Turing test) a lot depends on how you set the test up.

Here's another test:

A. a REAL TIME performance on a real piano, which IS NOT "HEARD DIRECTLY " but is heard THROUGH LOUDSPEAKERS (or headphones)

VS

B. a REAL TIME sampled or synthed piano performance, which--of necessity--is ALSO heard through loudspeakers?!

Under these conditions the difference between "real" and "synthed" might be difficult to tell, especially if the test uses run-of-the-mill speakers or headphones.

In short, piano samples vs real pianos, BUT AS LISTENED TO or AS HEARD THROUGH LOUDSPEAKERS, can be very hard to tell apart, even with material as carefully recorded and played as the Debussy sample mentioned above.

BUT as you make the test more comprehensive, the distinction between "real" and "fake," becomes much easier to make, and the Turing test much more difficult to pass.

TEST #3 PLAYING real vs PLAYING fake:
In this instance we have, on one hand, the feel of real let-off, real sustain, real hammer weight, real sympathetic vibrations, real slightly out-of-tune tri-chords and most important of all, REAL SOUND hitting REAL walls before hitting your REAL EARDRUMS. On the other hand, we have a modelled or sampled version of the above, plus--most importantly--the modelled or sampled sound of a piano reaching the eardrum of the player, not directly, BUT VIA LOUDSPEAKERS.

No contest. Turing test result: the fake FAILS to pass the test.

The "weak link" in the chain is not the sampling, but what is hitting your eardrums, as well as the felt sense of REAL let-off, hammer weight, etc.. under the fingers.

I'm sorry to hear that. For me personally any waiting for loading an instrument wouldn't be acceptable.

One thing though - in Vintage D, the original configuration loads very slow, while all user-saved configurations load instantly. I recall even reading about this in the manual. Perhaps the same could also work for other Kontakt instruments?

Some years' ago I played the Yamaha Grantouch and the Yamaha concert grand - went from one to the other. No contest, but DPs have come quite a way since then. Still not there, but for many, if not most, near enough.

A valid test would be - having somehow equalised the ffff volume - to have an acoustically transparent screen and the listener hear the same pianist go from DP to AP and back again a few times. Pianists I believe would hear the difference, but many non-pianists may not.

Re the "shades of grey": it is the action which provides the facility for shading the sound in those subtle ways and most (all?) DPs do not have a first class action. AP actions are indeed expensive, but AP keybeds not so costly. Is it so difficult for Kawai/Yamaha to attach the elctronic gubbins to a standard keybed for a reasonable cost? The VPC1 spec for instance does not say the keybed is the same as, say, one of the acoustic grands. Perhaps there are technical difficulties, but I believe that the costs of the Avant Grands etc are beyond many enthusiasts pocket and skillful but poor pianists are missing out. My experience with sampled pianos and Pianoteq, using the ES7, is that the limitations are with the ES7 action and the relatively few layers of the sampled sets, but only with the ES7 in relation to Pianoteq. I can get very fine shades of tone at a slow tempo with Pianoteq but the short key length will trip me up every so often at a fast pace, resulting in a lumpy sound. Pianoteq is immediately more playable, more like an acoustic. Not knocking the ES7 - I enjoy playing it and it's good value for the price - but longer keys really would make a difference and I find it difficult to believe that the cost of a bit more wood and machining would push prices up so much, for enthusiasts, of course, we are still talking about a small minority of customers. Maybe the resulting increase in size of the cabinet or enclosure is the largest cost factor.

Someone will no doubt tell me I've got it all wrong, but for me, playing and therefore listening via the ES7 and Pianoteq, and then listening via active monitors in a 25 foot room is not so different from listening to the Kawai RX2 - different sound of course anyway, "Bluethner" or "Steinway" vs echt Kawai - but comparable nonetheless.

I do not aspire to an acoustic concert grand - actually been there and done that in a previous house - in my relatively small room. An approximation to, say, a 6' grand - which more than fills my room - would suffice. A few more tweaks to Pianoteq and a better keybed would narrow the gap very considerably. Pianoteq will certainly improve their product. Better affordable hardware would be nice. And I'm quite happy supplying the computer, DAC and speakers.

@Toddy

Ivory American D has around 47 GB of samples since the samples are uncompressed, still, cantabile player loads any preset in 3 seconds on my PC when using all the velocity layers, same when loaded as a VST from within Cubase

I have kontakt free player with the giant which is around 4 Gb with compressed samples and takes a little longer to load ... but again of the order of perhaps 3 - 4 seconds perhaps, much less than 10 seconds for sure. Presumably it has to do some reverse algorithm of the compression to get the full data before loading to RAM.

In any case, it is all pretty much instant in that sort of time scale for me.

I imagine if you are short on RAM, got standard hard drives vesus SSD would increase quite a bit, but still. I used a standard drive 7200 RPM that was near full up with data a while back as an experiment with the Gaint, it as still under 10 seconds loading time. If your hardware is reasonably up to date though I would not expect that, 1 minute seems to perhaps suggest

Houston we have problem

or if you wish to reveal what sort of laptop/PC specs you are using that may be telling. You can diagnose these things under the windows task manager and performance tools if you got a windows versions like Pro edition or above, not sure home edition has these features but there are tools around for free download so you can profile everything should you so wish to find the culprit/bottleneck.

That is quite amusing in this context. The Debussy piece you heard was played by Krystian Zimerman on his Steinway D not a digital.



It depends on the question. If the question is which piano do you prefer the sound of, either the digital will win or the acoustic grand will win, depending on the choice of music, the skill of the pianist and the quality and condition of the acoustic piano. Is a V-Piano Grand ever going to be preferred to an immaculately prepared Steinway D by the vast majority of people? Probably not, but that doesn't imply that it is 'fake'.

Perhaps a better test would be for the same pianist to play a wide variety of music on a number of well prepared acoustic and high end digital pianos live, from behind an acoustically transparent screen. We could ask a randomly selected knowledgeable audience to rate the quality of each performance to see if there are any digitals that can compete or even beat acoustic pianos in terms of musicality.

As soon as you start asking "guess the fake", the audience will naturally concentrate on the sound, listening for digital artifacts and imperfections but digital pianos are not supposed to be "authentic-piano-sound" making machines! They are supposed to be MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS on which you can play music written for piano! I think too many people in this forum forget that.

So let us have the audience concentrate on the musicality that can be expressed. If a skilled pianist can give an equally moving, compelling performance of a demanding piece on a digital piano in a live environment then for me, that piano has passed the Turing performance and listening test and is a bona fide musical instrument, whether it sounds like the piano of your dreams or not.

I suggest the Debussy piece I linked to above or maybe Gaspard de la Nuit. Both pieces provide an extreme test of dynamics, tonal range and without a highly responsive and expressive keyboard action and without perfect integration, both pieces would be an utter disaster.

PS I am talking about the demands of classical music because that is my interest. The same Turing Test could apply to Gary Barlow playing live music by Take That on different pianos although naturally it would be much easier for a digital piano to pass in that situation, as they do every day in live pop/rock concerts around the world where the audience are not questioning if the piano sounds are 'real' or 'fake'...

PPS Cheers, Bennevis. I like a man who likes a challenge! I look forward to your Krystian Z preset(s) in due course.

Yes, well the computer is based on two Intel Xeons rated 3.4GHz - this should be plenty, but in fact they are rather inefficient compared to a good i7 or AMD equivalent. The hard disk runs at 7200 rpm, and RAM is 8 GB, which is not bad - many people seem to get by with 4GB to run virtual pianos and such.

But I'm not really worried about loading times - gives me a pause to think about how to play the part The real limiting factor is that you can't run many tracks together without running into problems at 128 samples in the buffer, so I have to work with 512 quite often, which of course gives a very noticeable latency (over 30ms).

One day, I hope, I'll get a new computer.

I would bet that is the case too. Then again, if no one is expecting the engineers to do anything even remotely bleeding edge, the job is suddenly a heck of a lot easier.


Same here. I expect to pay extra for the integration, but not hugely so.


It continues to improve, though glacially, and it didn't exactly have a head start to begin with.


Neither I, nor they, are in this to make friends. But if they expect me to bow and scrape while generally pointing out the obvious to them they can go jump in a lake.

I am sorry you feel this way. We definitely have different views of how we would want to interact with other people. I think civility goes a long way when asking for what we want. I was out of line in a comment I made to you and publicly apologized. I will continue to do that if I get out of line, but it is clear to me that different people have different senses as to what "out of line" may be. I personally think some of the things said to manufactures in this forum are out of line, but then we are all different.

Tony

It'll do me for now, no problem. So long as is does load eventually, I'm not worried.