Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards I will never use a VSTi anymore

In the link I posted:

http://www.speech.kth.se/music/5_lectures/askenflt/measure.html

It seems to be between 20-30 at velocity f. Just look at the picture in the link, the note is triggered 20-30 ms before the wave.

The link is borrowed from the second link. There is a huge discussion in Pianoteq forum about this.



No. As explained above.

And to wrap it up, 1/10, 1/15, 1/20 etc (which is 1ms here according to OP). It cannot be noticeable. OP is experiencing other issues, which to me cannot be any of what he is complaining about.

In the link above, there are measurements for every single mechanical action in the piano. Each row tells you what takes what time...

That's not the one I was thinking of ... though this is useful even though it shows only one sample (staccato forte).
There was a thread here long ago with a link to a journal-published research paper in pdf form.
It studied key, hammer, and string dynamics over a range of key velocities. Quite impressive. And quite dense.
Good luck finding it!

Mac - Do you mean this one from Prout?

"Touch and temporal behaviour of grand piano actions"

http://forum.pianoworld.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/2515204/re-how-to-measure-latency.html#Post2515204

The google search bar on the top left of PianoWorld is helpful sometimes although there are pages and pages of data. I typed in the following

acoustic latency type:pdf

You can also go to google and use something like site:forum.pianoworld.com

I think that's the one:
In that thread he references the paper:

Great! The paper you sent confirms what I am saying MacMacMac!

On the first page, right column, it says when you play forte, the delay on average is 25ms this excludes the time after the action passes the notch. I didn't go through the paper, but let's say after 25ms, there is a short period (after the notch) and the hammer will hit the strings.

1ms is 1/25th of 25ms. This is definitely not perceivable as the activation/deactivation of neurons is not like 0 and 1 but it is rather a smooth fall down.

Forte is relatively loud (starts at 96 velocities). So what I'm saying is not nonsense. I am expecting that a neuron is almost incapable of detecting 20-30 percent difference in length as the keys and mechanics in pianos vary. So anything less than 10ms sounds absolutely normal to ears.

I has nothing to do with the sensitivity of neurons, it just feels normal to the touch and ears because it is the same in real life!

Again, 1ms means nothing to me. According to research. The OP should investigate his/her own setup, software and stop complaning for no obvious reason.

In the end, as MacMacMac said, VSTs are only for people who cannot perceive that 1ms (like me). Although I never use a VST for Piano.

My Kawai MP7SE sounds really good and boots up in 3 seconds and beats RD-2000 in every single possible way. Especially the Piano sound, the delay and key action! :)))))

Again you try to look down on me by this comparision?
Those are way different machines. And the keybed of Kawai I didn't like, which is subjective.
I have the slight fear that you confuse microseconds with milliseconds.

What is better and what not is rather dependent on the person.
It seems like you want to >win< an argument.
While those papers are great reference, so are the others already posted.

But by your question if I already had used PianoTeq I can just confirm that you don't read my answers properly, therefore your credibility of answers is degraded.

Like someone else said here in this thread - the fine tuning, the loudness and other factors aren't taken into account with a VST as it creates a way too complex sub-system.
The manufacturers default should be used instead.

I actually looked down on myself. I am an inferior creature who cannot perceive a 1ms delay and I am doomed to use VSTs for the rest of my life and cannot enjoy 1ms of my life.

I also want to announce that you guys who play VSTs, you lose 1ms of your life every time you use a VST.

You should stop wasting your money and more importantly, your precious lives! Don't play VST anymore

Well, I guess I don't know what you're talking about.

Anyway ... virtual instruments work fine for me.

What are you looking for down there?

LoL I call him Mr. Masha-Allah!

Abdol, I appreciate your contributions, but you keep on insisting that a 1 ms difference cannot be perceived because according to your understanding of neurophysiology that is mechanistically impossible. My mentioning of the 10 microseconds difference (a factor 100 smaller) that can be perceived was not just my guess, but this has been an uncontroversial scientific finding for more than 50 years that has been replicated many times. Here is just one study. It is absolutely real, so neurons must somehow be able to do it. In fact, although hearing is one of the least understood sensory modalities in neuroscience, this phenomenon has been well-studied and a lot is known. This is a piano forum, so not the place to elaborate on this, but since you use these types of argument to argue against forum members' reported experiences, I would recommend this paper to learn more about the circuitry involved.

Thanks MacMacMac what a great source!

You missed my last post then.

The perception has nothing to do with neutrons. In fact 25ms is the time it’ll take for the hammer to reach the notch. After that the hammer is thrown at the strings. The fingers has no control on the hammer at this point.

25ms is also an average value for f. It can be less or more depending on the key your pressing and the piano you’re playing.

Add to all of these the fact that 1ms is quit fast.

Let me give you an example: if something moves for 1ms right in front of your eyes you can’t say what it was! You only can say it seems something passed.

Add all of these as variables of this equation and you’ll realize that 10ms delay is hard to detect for piano. You can for sure insist on your point, that’s not the majority though. Majority of human beings are OK with it.

So what’s the outcome?

OP said it: Don’t play VSTs anymore!

I know the conversation has somewhat moved on, but because these misconceptions tend to persist, I did want to go back and point out that it's entirely untrue that human auditory perception has some lower limit around the single-digit ms range. Just like "the human eye can only see 30fps," or "no one will ever need more than 640kb RAM," it's simply not true.

There are a number of ways to test this. One is here: https://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_timing_2w.php?time=1

You can select delays between 1ms and 100ms and take a blind test to see if you can tell the difference between 0ms and 1ms delay. I'm not particularly sensitive in the auditory space, but it wasn't hard to ace the test after getting used to the delay:



In fact, this test is harder than it needs to be. I once found a link to a set of WAV files that demonstrated this in a more stark way--imagine a simple continuous tone, with a 1ms gap in the middle. I'm certain that anyone would be able to notice that audible gap. And if you can notice it, your perception is not limited to slices greater than 1ms.

Of course, the contrast for the delay is super important here. If you simply delay the start of a note on your VST by 1ms, would you notice? Maybe not in isolation. But if you're used to hearing or feeling the thunk from your keypress in relation to the sounding of the note, then a slight delay between that and the note hitting your ears CAN be perceptible in some cases and for some people. For me, when playing I can tell the difference between a ~2-3ms gap within a certain threshold of total delay, being caused by the 2-3ft distance between the speakers and my ears. It's not *horrible* but it's noticeable if I pay attention.

In what religion the delay in a Paino is set to a fixed value?

The average is 25 ms. So it means it can be some times 26 ms other times 27 ms or 24 ms or even 23 or maybe even 20 ms! So you tell me how you are going to tell the difference.

Do you actually think that acoustic piano is made out of 0s and 1s? or your neurons fire 0s and 1s?

You don't have a CPU in your brain. Our brain is a biological organ. Sometimes when you are drunk even 100ms is not perceivable.



There are so many other factors that adds delay to the sound we here, thus 5-10ms sounds natural and normal!!!

I didn't say your brain can't detect 2ms or 3ms (although brain can never accurately detect it brain probably works at 25-100Hz). I am saying 10ms extra here will not make the VST sound unnatural or abnormal.

This is a good point and may explain some of the reported differences in sensitivity between people

More serious, the variation in latency of an acoustic as described in the JASA paper, is very interesting. I guess a lot would depend on how predictable that variation is. That is, as you play you learn (unconsciously of course) to control for the predictable latency variation that is a function of a given key and finger movement. The question is: how much latency variation is then left?

In any case, this is different from comparing a digital piano with and without VSTi, which was the topic of the OP.

Summarizing what I learned from this thread:

* After a lot of effort (in terms of hardware and software) to get a very short round trip latency when using VSTi's, the OP remains disappointed in the results, and concludes that just using the on-board system works better for him. In response, some report that they also notice short latencies, others report not to experience them or at least not to be bothered by them too much.
* It has been claimed that the OP must be mistaken because such differences cannot be experienced because our neurons are unable to do this. In response, it was pointed out that it is a solid scientific result that the known neural/perceptual limit is roughly a factor 100 smaller, albeit for a different auditory latency task.
* Of more practical interest was the scientific study that showed that even untrained particpants judge the playability of a digital percussion instrument with an overall latency of 10 ms as better than when the latency was 10ms with an added maximum jitter of +/- 3ms (uniform distribution, so average of 1.5 ms absolute), even when they report not noticing the latency differences. As a consequence, the authors/experts recommend 1 ms jitter or less for digital instruments.
* There was a technical discussion on hardware that I did not completely follow, but as far as I understand it seems difficult in pactice to get jitter below 1 ms in VSTi's because of the way USB/MIDI works. PCIe could be a solution. Perhaps Kawai James is listening in and could suggest this to the developers for future pianos .
* As a side topic, there was a very interesting paper on latencies of acoustic pianos that showed variation of tens to hundreds of milliseconds, as a function of key type and key movement.

One correction, I see PCIe in itself is not perse a solution. In the end your OS/drivers will determine the jitter.

^ As I use PCIe already, I can confirm this.

This thread has gone off into la-la-land. No one is making any sense anymore. Really.

In the test linked by Gombessa I can distinguish the two sounds until down to 10ms. At 5ms I cannot distinguish anymore. Maybe is for this that I consider 5ms an incredible good latency for my poor brain... Lower than that is like to generate over 120fps on a poor 60Hz monitor... Useless!!