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Merry Christmas! I've been playing around with some voices and I've made two recordings, one with Pure Piano 08 and the other with Concert 01. Here are the links:

YouTube: Beethoven, piano sonata no.8, op.13, 3rd movement (Pure Piano 08) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQx-LDONf9c

YouTube: Beethoven, piano sonata no.26, op.81a, 1st movement (Concert 01) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=untw05vQXtQ

(Please forgive the hiccups. Too many Jack&Cokes. )

The voice you choose for a given piece does really matter (although as a staunch supporter of real pianos I refused to believe it), which constitutes another advantage in being able to play on a digital piano. I find Concert 01 to be more suitable to large soundscapes, while Pure Piano 08 is more intimate, best used for lyrical pieces. I didn't do any tweaking on Concert 01, it's got the factory default settings. Pure Piano 08 has been darkened and mellowed out quite a lot, with a lot of resonance added. They both have a lot of reverb.

Anyway, hope this helps in finding your perfect piano.

Bless

Nice playing!!

By the way, there is no such thing as too many Jack & Cokes

Sounds excellent! The fortes absolutely smash my best sample library (N.I The Grandeur) into the dust, too.

Greg.

Thank you, siros and Greg! Much appreciated. Cheers!

Yeah, the forte is amazingly well done, and if you up the resonance it's almost too much of a beast. Overall, great digital piano for the price. Keyboard is easy on the fingers as well, easy to control the phrasing.

Very impressive, OneAhau! I listened this morning and they set the right atmosphere. The choice of piano in both cases is excellent. I wonder if 'Pure Piano 8' is intended to be a historic instrument? The two piano sounds show this Roland DP in a very good light, IMO. Full of character and with subtle detail.

As for the playing, I always think Beethoven is very difficult and demanding and to be able to play with such feeling and originality after Jacks & Coke is remarkable!...Though perhaps you had another between the opus 13 and the opus 81a.

Hi, i agree with you, excellent DP, but for much less money i prefer Kawai CN34 for a better key action. Cheers.

!!!???!!!

Thank you, Toddy!

I don't know if Pure Piano is an emulation of a historic instrument. In its unaltered form, it has a very simple timbre, almost devoid of overtones, crystal clear. Once you mellow it out, it's magic.

On the bonus Jack&Coke, you could tell, huh? ROFL! I don't remember the details, but I seem to recall there was a lot of swaying and humming when I recorded op. 81a. TBH, when it comes to Beethoven I tend to be sloppy. As long as the music is right, I don't really care about hitting the right notes. One aspect is that the scores are technically more difficult than I can manage right now, but the main thing is that he's my "bestie" so we don't stand on ceremony for each other. We seem to like our relationship rough around the edges. I could never do that with Schubert, Mozart, Chopin or Bach - with these guys the goal is always a clean performance.

Do you have different attitudes to different composers?

Right. In that case, it probably isn't specifically a period piano. Roland have included a selection of these since the generation before the HP506, but they are presumably clearly labelled as such: Pre pianos of the 17th c., early ones of the classical period and at least another from the time of Chopin and so on.



The limits to which the definition of 'sloppy' apply differ very significantly between your and my use of the term. I dearly wish I could be sloppy by your definition and not mine.



Yes, I do. Of the three stratospherically great composers, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, Beethoven is the one always struggling to express something that's never been expressed before. That struggle is evident in the music, and often yields exquisite beauty but occasionally a pair of dogs bollocks. Beethoven had the self conviction and power of personality - or maybe the gall - to put forward almost preposterous propositions.

When it comes to the Hammerclavier sonata, there are passages where the fight is so exhausting that it's barely possible for either the player or the listener to contain it without it spewing into madness. Amazing.

Beethoven strove after glimpses of heaven whereas Bachs's gaze was pretty constant and always sharp and encompasses the whole universe. Mozart was already in heaven.

Aye, so true. Those bollocks seem to mostly populate his early output, I'd say. So many early sonatas that are, well... just not very good. But the later stuff... unbelievable. It's like he's tapping into some part of the human soul that we've all forgotten it even exists. Or maybe he's creating a whole new function of the human heart. I remember having had this intense feeling when I listened to the 2nd movement of the Waldstein in my early teens.



I once played the 3rd movement in a public library for some public event (unlike many, I have no problem playing single movements of a sonata in public, probably because I'm not a professional so I have no reputation to protect), and the main reaction I got was incomprehension, depression, headaches and one cheery bravo. That bravo was probably for finishing the piece.



Wonderfully insightful descriptions!!! For me, Beethoven seems to turn his back on the whole lot - heaven and heck and humanity - and go after something altogether different, God knows what. As for Mozart, I think he went to heaven, figured it out pretty quickly, and came back to tell dirty jokes about it. Guy was street-smart as heck, which is why his music is so incredibly romantic and cynical at the same time. Bach - you put it perfectly, he was earnest to the core.

Kate Bush was pretty good too, yknow. Her stuff ripped every fellas heart out including mine. And like everybody else, I fell in love wi her.
Trouble was Id just been married a fortnight. . .

I remember once I was listening Mozarts symphony 41, 4th mvt I think, I was high on weed, and it was amazing how the music did sound, it seemed to me as it was all made out of farts, the first minute of the piece caught me for an hour,probably even more,it was the most delightfull músic I had ever listen,and it was a symphony of farts and I remember thinking Oh man how it is posible that this music has ever been performed in public,including kins and queens? He is making fun of all us and nobody notices!

Maybe it's because he was always high on champagne?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T4z6MI4hkU

Not sure I agree totally. I've come - mostly as a listener - to regard the earlier sonatas more and more highly. Opus 10 number three is wonderful - it's like another world from numbers one and two (good though they are too). It's as if he's suddenly seen the world in a new way entirely - like a new dimension.



You are brave. The third movement on its own could cause all kinds of ailments or possibly a war. Be careful.



Exactly so. Mozart was quite an ordinary man judging by his letters: clever, vain, picky and affectionate. The music is something from somewhere else altogether, though. I'm not fond of his piano sonatas for some odd reason, though I love the concertoes and many of the chamber works, wind ensembles and so on. His operas show him to have been very smart indeed in his understanding of human beings - as you say, romantic and cynical.

As opposed to Mozarts piano sonantas, which I'm not crazy about, Bachs 48 and Beethoven's Piano Sonatas are quite well described, as in that old piano teachers' adage as the Old and New Testements. A pupil who learns the slightest thing from either of those sets is greatly enriched.

Peterws said:
She certainly was - still is. These days she's decided she prefers relative anonymity, though. Lovely woman, indeed.

Snail said:

Good heavens!



Well, I never did! This is astonishing....LOL Something similar happened to me once with a Bach organ fugue. Only, you know what happened? Each of the subjects and answers turned into vines wrapping round and round the organ until it was totally engulfed in foliage.

Oh, I agree, there are some gems there. The first one isn't bad, and op.14 no.2 has a lovely first movement. Then there's the gorgeous op.22. If he had only written the first volume of the Henle edition of piano sonatas, I'd be more susceptible to finding hidden loot. What with the second volume, it's like staring into the sun - I just don't see the stars.



Simply beautiful. Reminds me of the movie Logan's Run, when Logan and Jessica arrive at the Capitol.

Simply beautiful. Reminds me of the movie Logan's Run, when Logan and Jessica arrive at the Capitol. [/quote]

I think he meant the organ got strangled. . .

Really? Where? What? Who says only images can serve in Rorschach tests?

Thanks for this. Really good playing!

I'm happy for you, but I'm a little disappointed myself.
The sound of the HP-506 seems quite a step up from my HP-505. It's still a rather aggressive tone in the fortes (a little too much for my taste), but the overall sound is a lot less muddy and more clear and bright.

I'm annoyed by this because I wonder why Roland couldn't make it better in the first place.
Surely the difference between 505 en 506 can't be that big? (I've owned a HP-201 before and the muddy sound on that one was even worse)

I compared your recordings to some of my own recordings. I record directly from the HP-505 to .WAV on USB stick, so a lack of quality can't be caused by cables or recording equipment or anything.

You say you didn't make any changes to the Concert 01. Did you have both Brilliance and Ambience enabled on on their default values? Did you do anything to alter the audio recording afterwards?

Do any other owners of a HP-505 notice the difference?

Hi, babama, thanks!

No, I didn't do anything to Concert 01 except add reverb. I record on a USB stick, then import it directly to my video editing software, then YouTube. I wonder why yours sounds different. It shouldn't, huh?

For the price, it's a very decent DP, though. I'm sure that V Piano sounds much better, but it's out of reach for many of us, phew...

Did you try listening to your recordings from another computer? I tried to upgrade to Wondows 10 a few days ago, and it messed up my audio so badly I went back to 8.1. The dynamic range was compressed so hard I could hardly recognize my recordings.

Anyway,. cheers, and Happy New Year!

Thanks for your reply. Happy New Year to you as well!

I don't think my computer has anything to do with it. It really does seem that the sound of the latest models (504, 506 and 508) has actually improved. See also this review:

http://azpianonews.blogspot.nl/2014...5-Recommended-best-new-lowest-price.html

The keyboard action is also improved.

I may actually upgrade my 505 to a 506 if I can get a good deal. The above review and your recordings have pretty much convinced me that there is a significant improvement.