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Thank you for making this topic. This is probably the most anticipated virtual instrument of this year for me. On the other hand, I wonder what made them go with the CFX and not with a Steinway instead. The Garritan CFX is very good and very successful. They're gonna have a hard time trying to rival it. IMHO they should have done a Steinway instead. Even though the amount of Steinways out there is high, there are only few who I feel are actually playable well and sound great at the same time. Could have knocked it out of the park with it, instead they go for a piano for which there's a near flawless product out there. I don't know if this is the right choice. Also, considering how the Vienna Imperial was a disappointment for me (we talked about this), I have a hard time actually feeling excited for their new piano. Time will tell. Now I want to know the release date as soon as possible, and how much it'll cost.
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Very interesting. It would be great if it doesn't need a 2Tb SSD and 128GB of RAM
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Nice one. Never been that enamoured by the Garritan CFX so the more the merrier I say.
Greg
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Now I want to know the release date as soon as possible, and how much it'll cost. From this moment any day till the end of june (april to june 2018). I think that VSL use better technology to sample this piano, and half pedal, repedaling and some more advanced stuff will be incorporate. I have high expectation for this because VSL have lots of experience with sampling, and their Vienna imperial is still unmatched for number of velocity layers and playability in piano sample world. Buy the way this piano have more then half less samples per note compare to Vienna imperial, but this is not crucial to make top class product if they nailed sound and feel and this around 480 samples per note is still huge.
Last edited by slobajudge; 04/26/18 04:26 PM.
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Very interesting. It would be great if it doesn't need a 2Tb SSD and 128GB of RAM Why did you write this. The requirements for the Vienna Imperial is 46.8GB. It is quite low for a 100 velocity level piano. It runs ok on my 8GB memory system. The Vienna Imperial is quite fast to load compared to the Garritan CFX. This could press me to buy VSL CFX, replace Garritan CFX and save some disk. (My SSD is full !) - The Imperial (Bösendorfer) has been recorded helped by the CEUS system. Perhaps VSL choose the CFX because of the Disklavier system which would help to have acurate nuance while playing the notes. I have read the Steinway equivalent, the Spirio is proprietary and can’t read unapproved MIDI files.
Last edited by Frédéric L; 04/26/18 05:26 PM.
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@slobajudge I have seen the Q2 annoucement so I am aware it has to be until end of June. It's just that, if they release such a teaser with "Soon. Very soon." written in it, I would assume it might get released, probably, very soon, hopefully. Also, I feel like the Vienna Imperial had too many uneven notes. Some notes would be way too quiet when compared to the others, some others were too sharp. I spent way too much time on the note editor and still couldn't get a satisfactory result after several weeks. Raising the quiet notes would make them too loud for their timbre and they would keep sticking out, but in a different way. The instrument does have its qualities for sure, but it's outplayed by the Garritan CFX in this regard, IMHO.
@Frederic L. You can remove mic perspectives from the Garritan CFX so you only have one perspective that uses around 25 GB on your disk (without soft samples), so the size is not much of an issue to me personally because I pretty much dislike two of the three perspectives. But I do agree about the loading times, but that is a fairly small gripe, wouldn't you agree? I'll just wait ten seconds and play a superior instrument. If I want Speedy Pianozales I'll load up Pianoteq in half a second and enjoy those deeply rich, authentic, beautiful sounds, lol. Anyway, what you say about the CEUS and Disklavier system makes sense, I did not consider this. Thank you for bringing that up. I didn't even know that Steinway had a proprietary midi playback system too. They could have handled it like for example Bechstein who used a kind of robot for their sampling. Honestly I find it hard to understand how sample makers record their samples with a real pianist. It's super hard to be consistent across the keyboard and across all velocity levels. On the other hand, even using a mechanical system like VSL used for the Imperial doesn't neccessarily yield the desired results.
Last edited by Grazilerimba; 04/26/18 06:16 PM.
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I didn’t know that you can remove perspectives from the Garritan CFX. Do you do it with the file manager ?
The issue is that most perspectives come by 3 or 2. If I suppress all but the binaural perspective, the player choice may fail to load the close stereo perspective.
Last edited by Frédéric L; 04/27/18 06:20 AM.
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I didn’t know that you can remove perspectives from the Garritan CFX. Do you do it with the file manager ? That's the way I could do it--aborted full install and copied only the files/folders from the perspective I actually wanted. CFX's player is happy to skip unfound files without throwing an exception. It would be great is there is an easier way.
Bosendorfer D214VC ENPro Past: Yamaha P-85, P-105, CP50, Kawai MP11, Kawai NV10
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Yes of course, it will inevitably be compared against the Garritan CFX, simply because it's also a "Yamaha CFX" instrument - and we know that Abbey Road Studios already did a very good job sampling Garritan's CFX library and that's a tough act to follow, probably the best virtual piano on the market today - but the same comparison could rightly be made of ANY new virtual piano asking us to part with our money. They are all competing for sales against what is already out there in the world, and what has been done before.
Before we split hairs over whether it's (supposed to sound like) a Steinway, a Bosendorfer, a Yamaha, a Fazioli, a Ravenscroft, a Kawai or whatever brand or model, the biggest question is, "does it even sound 100% like a realistic acoustic instrument I'm hearing?" because from my experience so far, I've never played any software instrument piano that does 100%, and I own dozens of them, including Garritan CFX too. The job of a virtual library is to replicate a real life piano. Doesn't hardly matter which one, just if it could get within 99.99% of replicating any real acoustic piano it would be a miracle, let alone the finest concert grand.
We all would agree that if Father Christmas came down our chimney and gave us a real life, brand new, 9 foot concert grand to play on, we'd be pretty delighted with it as a free gift, even if it was a Bosendorfer and we preferred Steinway, or even if it was a 9 foot Steinway and we preferred a 10 foot Fazioli or whatever. Truth be told, all these instruments are way above the pay grade of what most of us can ever afford to have in our own homes, and that's why we make do with crappy virtual libraries to record with, and fake feeling digital keyboards to play them on, although we may own a modest upright acoustic or a small baby grand piano, we'll never own a £300,000 Bosendorfer for real. Whatever the brand name, in real life ANY of those 9 foot grand concert level instruments are plenty good enough for us to express all our musical technique and abilities on, and would be 100% satisfying to perform any recital of piano works on, unless we're utter, utter, utter brand snobs.
We can't get anywhere close to that playability or visceral experience from any virtual instrument, heard through headphones or loudspeakers. Even if we're clever enough to record some playing beforehand, and just sit and listen to playback afterwards to remove the awkward "fingers on keyboard" feelings from the equation for a moment and concentrate purely on sound quality of the sample playback for realism. And certainly not without listening to playback with some serious high-output multi-way FIR corrected audiophile loudspeakers capable of reproducing the piano's sound down to bottom A at 27.5Hz at least! Also linear phase FIR speaker processing must by definition introduce DSP latency which we wouldn't enjoy for live playing anyway. My own tri-amped 3-way FIR linear phase system has 64ms latency because the 6144 tap FIR engine running at 48kHz has a 128ms transfer function file duration. (6144 taps / 48,000Hz = 0.128 seconds) Without FIR correction, you can never have accurate (linear phase / flat amplitude / <20Hz to >20kHz ) sound reproduction, and without accurate sound, you can't reproduce a piano note's transient with convincing fidelity enough to ever fool the ear, no matter how good the raw samples might be. No point if they fail to playback correctly through your speakers. People that play commercial digital piano's through their built-in crappy 5 inch 2-way built-in speakers and 30W power amps and passive crossovers, and then talk about they're not happy with the timbre, what tone / EQ settings should they use???!!!! They should give up and use a better system altogether.
The answer to that conundrum is that the sampled digital / virtual piano only replaces / or tries to replicate the acoustic piano within the recording chain itself, and cannot be expected to sound better than those microphone setups and that recording chain itself does, and by extension, through your loudspeaker playback chain too. Not the real life experience of sitting at the piano bench in front of one. So if you insisted on having a real life Bosendorfer miked up in the recording studio next door and ran the electrical signal from their studio preamps into your house and plugged it into some aux inputs into your micro hi-fi system or your digital piano's built-in 5 inch speakers it still would sound crap. You could hardly expect a real life Bosendorfer recording to sound any better under the same circumstances. But given accurate enough monitoring, one can hear those subtle telltale disparities between a real life piano being recorded and a multi-sampled recreation of one being a little bit fake. Although that gap is closing more and more as technology improves and products like Garritan CFX are starting to sound very convincing, if listened to in context of the recording chain philosophy rather than the "real instrument experience."
So all new virtual pianos that are introduced into today's market must all being compared to Garritan CFX already. If that's currently the best product and costs £149, why should we pay any more for anything else? Why should we bother buying anything cheaper if we know it's inferior? Even if they're "Steinway" samples and not supposed to sound like a "Yamaha CFX" they're still gonna be compared to Garritan CFX because their primary task is still to replicate the sound of a recorded concert grand piano, first and foremost, and if Garritan CFX is the no 1 product currently deemed the best so far at doing that job, it's the industry yardstick all new products have to aspire to. Companies should ask themselves "Can we sample pianos better than Abbey Road Studios? Are we using better mics / preamps / AD converters / do we have better mic placements? Can we build a better mousetrap?" Are we just trying to jump on a commercial bandwagon by knocking together a suitable piano collection (Arturia / Native Akoustik, etc.) to include as part of our larger software bundle package? Are we just trying to sell a few more piano libraries on the strength of our few previous successes over a decade ago and our still lingering big name reputation? (Synthogy)
Rather than asking is VSL's new CFX as good as Garritan's? We should ask is every new software piano at least as good or better than the best we've already got? If it's not, why did the company even bring it to market? Nobody would try to market a 200MHz computer with 16Mb of RAM these days? The technology status quo has moved forward a long way. So any new software piano these days must be able to compete with the best that's out there already, if it wants to be taken seriously. And the competitive battle is not to deliver one particular brand of piano better than somebody else, but to deliver a concert grand piano (whichever brand) to a level of realism better than everybody else before has.
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If the best virtual piano is a VSL at 480€... there is still a place for concurrent models even with an inferior quality. And the best model could differ between users. There are objective criteria (no heard gap between velocity levels, repedalling, how the forte pedal is rendered : computed resonances, dedicated), less objective quality. And different users will have different way of averaging these factors. And one more important thing is the taste of users. If Synthogy propose Strinway, Fazioli, Bösendorfer, etc. It is because different people have different tastes. You may propose me the best Yamaha C7 virtual piano, and I could decline since it has not the piano timbre I like. But perhaps yours is better voiced from a personnal point of view .
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It seems I'm one of the few who don't like the Garritan CFX. I just can't get past the hiss in the lower velocity samples, despite trying my best to reduce this using EQ and noise filters. I very much like the tone of the instrument though and would welcome an alternative. Bring it on!
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@Smaug, the Garritan CFX has one of my prefered tone, but it is true there is a sort of white noise I don’t appreciate.
I am too very impatient of finding an alternative CFX. (And a promotion : if it is at 480€ like Vienna Imperial, I will try too wait a discount).
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The white noise I can live with fine in CFX, I guess, it depends on the headphones and setup, if you got bright cans that are sensitive, then it would bother me , but I would not like that pairing of very bright revealing headphones with the CFX anyway, it's bright enough all by itself, something like a HD650 or 598, or Fidelio X2 that I use compensates for this nicely for me, these are not so sensitive to noise floors. It isn't that you can't hear it at times, but it is not so intrusive for me to get annoyed by it. Ivory can have a fair amount of noise too if you push the dynamic range up a bit to close to the 50 dB region, and especially after normalisation it can be heard easily in recordings in that case, so CFX is not unique in that department. I've noticed it with the ravenscroft too at times, but the preset where this happens I to have the tone knob up a bit to the bright side, but a timbre shift of -2. CFX is not alone, but probably one of the greater offenders in that department. In the end I rather live with a bit of noise with a good natural sound as possible, rather than the excessive cleaning up of some samples you get that just potentially destroy a nicer timbre and/or character. Of course the best of both worlds would be great too.
Selftaught since June 2014. Books: Barratt classic piano course bk 1,2,3. Humphries Piano handbook, various... Kawai CA78, Casio AP450 & software pianos. 12x ABF recitals. My struggles: https://soundcloud.com/alexander-borro
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Of course the best of both worlds would be great too. This sum up my point of view. A better virtual piano than an excellent one would be near the perfection. The issues of Garritan CFX doesn’t prevent me to classify it as one of my favourites. Note : I use Garritan CFX with AKG702, but I didn’t remember having heard noise from Ivory.
Last edited by Frédéric L; 04/29/18 05:16 PM.
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I was hoping to see the ACD in the chart but i don't see it. I have spent the entire last month recording/testing/bouncing all the piano vsts that i own hence i have to make a decision which one to use for my next album. Both the CFX and the Ravenscroft play like a dream and i enjoy hearing them in realtime as i play through headphones but once bounced and i listen to them in my car's bose system, they are both pretty darn noisy. The noises are pretty subtle in volume but it all adds up i guess when you play something dynamic with a LOT of sustain pedal involved.
The Ivory ACD sounded the cleanest to me when bounced but i wait to stand corrected about the noise in it. I looked in the chart but no mention of it.
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What does this mean? The Ivory ACD sounded the cleanest to me when bounced ... I've never "bounced" a piano, so I'm not sure what you mean.
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Very interesting. It would be great if it doesn't need a 2Tb SSD and 128GB of RAM Why did you write this. It was a joke
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What does this mean? The Ivory ACD sounded the cleanest to me when bounced ... I've never "bounced" a piano, so I'm not sure what you mean. Bouncing midi to Audio, exporting to wav using DAW etc...
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