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Hi,

Is this still a top VST to get? I was thinking of getting it, I have Garritan CFX and Ivory 2 ACD. Unlike the majority of users on here I actually dont think the CFX is that musical, I think the internal CFX on my CP4 is more musical and plays a lot better, Ivory is closer to my liking.

I have 8gb RAM, Intel I5 2.7ghz and SSD, is that enough to run this? I can run Garritan and ivory at 256 buffer size without many issues, any higher I have pops and drop outs at random times here and there, not constantly. (for some reason!!)

I cant believe how small the install size is on the 275, especially when compared to the massive Garritan size of 122 gb or whatever it is.

I was thinking of getting 275 or the Spectronics/Custom LA grand, but dont need all those other sounds with it.

Cheers

Mark

You PC will do just fine.

The term "top VST" is subjective. I have Garritan CFX and Ravenscroft both. I like Garritan CFX a lot more than Ravenscroft. Thought, now-a-days, I am exclusively using Embertone Walker 1955 Concert D Full - which I prefer to Garritan CFX (my second choice) and Pianoteq 6 (my third choice).

Osho

If Garritan CFX is available on your PC, Ravenscroft 275 will be even more possible. And 275 has less than 10GB capacity.
As Osho said, 'what is the top' is subjective. While CFX has wet sound, 275 has dry sound. I like both pianos, but I prefer to add an external reverb to the 275's dry sound.
To tell you the statistical story, yes, 275 is still one of the top VSTs loved by many artists.

I was just listening to the demo songs again (or people playing the VST instrument on youtube) and it sounds more thin, more metallic, and with a stronger attack than Garritan CFX (Lite). It's good for certain styles of music (if you want to cut through the mix) but I'm not sure how tweakable it is to make it sound warmer. Cutting the EQ doesn't seem like the right technique. I certainly would like to try it, but not for $199.

In terms of PC performance, the Ravenscroft 275 is not particularly demanding; much less so than the Garritan CFX, so you should have no problems.

It's good in terms of playability and dynamic range, but the sound may not be to your taste. As some of the posters above have said, it's a close, dry, cold and metallic sound, and diametrically opposite the Ivory signature sound which is more distant, more wet and a lot warmer. The Garritan CFX sits somewhere in between the two in terms of sound signature, so if you're more inclined towards Ivory than Garritan, I really don't imagine you'll like the Ravenscroft sound.

FWIW my experience has been the exact opposite. Hosting in Cubase provides a real-time peak CPU meter showing the Ravenscroft to be amongst the worst performers - not quite as bad as the C.Bechstein. And that's reflected in optimum buffer settings.

In sharp contrast, I've found the Garritan CFX to be possibly the least demanding of any library - it's big but its size doesn't correlate with its appetite for resources (other than disk space!).

In my experience, Ravenscroft 275 is very demanding.
With the same setup (Intel NUC with I5 CPU, optimized for VST, RME Babyface) that runsGalaxy Vintage D on Kontakt 5 and Pianoteq Pro 6.3 flawlessly, Ravenscroft has never been able to run without crackles, pops and glitches. This makes it unusable in practice.

Hmm, how curious. I've never had a problem with it at all on my creaking five-year old system (Core i7, but from the Haswell generation). Guess it's more demanding than I realised.

Appraised on its own merits I'd agree, the Ravenscroft 275 will perform perfectly well on even quite modest (post 2010?) PCs but depending on polyphony, other performance traffic and other PC duties it can be bettered.

My favourite if unsubtle efficiency test is to hold sustain while glissing up and down the keyboard. I've just checked this again for both the RC 275 and Garritan CFX using an Audient id14 with its recently improved drivers. The Garritan manages this at a 16 sample buffer without any sign of overload whereas I'd need to up this to 64 for the RC and even then it's touch and go, in particular when the sustain is released which can cause a nasty audible glitch as it tries to release all notes 'simultaneously'.

So for everyday playing with no other tasks I'm sure the Ravenscroft will do fine on most modern-ish PCs @ 64 but for recording these days I use two cameras running into a pair of HDMI cards which, when I last tested, necessitated running RC with a 256 sample buffer.
A possible reason? (someone can correct me on this) - I think the RC is a compressed format so when a sample tail is accessed on the disc the CPU has the additional burden of real-time decompression.

Yes, the Ravenscroft does use real-time decompression, so it is quite CPU dependent.

Hey Mark,

For ivory, did you ever get it to not have latency, and work having response like your CP4's internal sounds?

Thanks for the comments, much appreciated, if anything I've been put off buying it for now lol, unless it comes on sale i may consider it.

Ivory 2 ACD i just feel is richer than garritan and better for ballads as i can bring the notes out better that i want. Not managed to get it without latency no, its less demanding on my system than garritan i think though.

IMO UVI Ravenscroft 275 is still in the top list today. Due to the high quality of this instrument, I bought also VI True Keys Pianos package and find the Italian Grand on the same top level or even better.

I think Italian is even better for many reasons. Its timbre is less "metallic", richer, it is more variable and at the same time consistent across velocities and registers (unlike Synthogy ACG, in which I am disappointed after long attempts to tame it). Player and Side mic positions have especially rich "percussive" sound with long sustain. The polyphony of many notes, played in different velocities and tempos, is very distinctable, sounds beautifully and naturally, without any noise artifacts. Pedal resonance, pedaling, re-pedaling, and una corda pedaling are implemented on the top level too. I only had to modify the velocity curve for adapting it to my MIDI controller.

Yeah, it's still one of the best. Tired for my favorite sampled piano.

I *love* the Embertone's samples - it's almost the perfect piano sample imo. But no matter what I do, I'm never satisfied with the dynamic range, especially compared to pianoteq, but even against other sampled VSTs. There's just not enough of a volume and brightness difference between piano and forte imo. Ravenscroft is much better in this regard. I prefer them both to Garritan though.

Nowadays I'm more into pianoteq though. The most recent release, the Petrof, is a substantial realism jump for me, and I always think pianoteq is more realistic at resonances.

I think that for many sampled instruments, including the top ones, (1) tuning style and (2) stiffness of the felt tips of the hammers and dampers are under-treated -- that is, their importance is not fully understood.

1: String co-sounding in double and triple strings, belonging to middle-register notes, drastically affects the sound. These strings are not identical. A tiny dissonance between them defines the instrument individuality as well as the tiny dissonance between octave-related and other harmonics-related strings.

2: Piano tuners typically apply special materials & needles, and sometimes iron the hammer tips to make them softer / harder, remove string traces (furrows) resulted from numerous strikes, and they should do this consistently in all the frame.

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to model this art of piano tuner programmatically. We can have a lot of software parameters in a VSTi, but the physical features of the sampled instrument are unchanged. It is impossible to make hammers softer by adding a reverberation.

The only sampled "softer-hammers" instrument, which I know, is Alicia Keys. Ravenscroft-275 has very stiff hammers. Garritan CFX probably is slightly softer-milder. In VI Italian grand the mentioned tiny dissonances make very individual and beautiful sounds. I think many instruments may be characterized in this way.

I owned a copy of the Ravenscroft 275, persisted with it for over a year, but then sold it. I found it to be a sterile & clinical piano tone - a bit soul-less for want of a better word. Didn't like the hammer attack tone of the middle register - almost sounded like an electric piano to me at times. The real acoustic Ravenscroft 275 uses different materials compared to other brands (eg. titanium strings) and given how new the piano was that they sampled it, I think a better result would have been achieved after 3-4 years, when the soundboard had 'opened up' and the piano as a whole loosened up a bit and achieved some character & warmth.

Also, I agree with Andew G's comments above regarding the importance of tuning, hammer prep/voicing before a piano is sampled. It's clear that some developers don't pay enough attention to this, and focus more on the technical aspects/velocity layers, GUI etc. instead of selecting and prepping the best instrument they can to begin with. I'm always amazed at what a difference my piano tuner can make with my acoustic piano after tuning & voicing. Like another instrument, and in a good way.

I'm also a fan of the VI Labs Italian Fazioli. The pick of all the VI Labs pianos in my opinion, and the FLAC compression of the samples makes it very efficient to run.

It doesn't use titanium strings. It has titanium string terminations, which the steel strings pass over.

Any sampled piano includes this. The issue may be that pianos are presumably professionally tuned when sampled, whereas in the real world, most of us are lucky if a piano we're playing has been properly tuned in the last 6 months. So we spend most of our real piano playing time playing pianos that are probably (if we're lucky) just very slightly out of tune. You might be able to simulate that on some DPs by layering two copies of the same piano sound, and detuning them very slightly.


There is also the related issue of stretch tuning, where notes are intentionally detuned as they move farther from center, to better align the harmonics. This is also addressed in most digitals, whether by sampling a stretch-tuned piano, or by allowing the player to manipulate the tuning in this way (temperament).

Hello -

When was the Ravenscroft 275 Virtual Instrument last updated ? a lot of the demos are from 2014 and 2015 ...

Thanks,
Dan