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I am wondering if anyone have noticed a fade of the sound of a note or a chord when it is pressed while the damper pedal is down and then switching the pedal while keeping the same note pressed. I am noticing a sudden fade of the note intensity with every pedal switch. It only happens on the higher register of the keyboard (C5 and upward). I don't have this issue on my old digital piano.

I think this also happened with older AvantGrands. Weird

Do you mean the resonances are suddenly dampened when you lift the pedal? That would be expected on a real piano, in my opinion.

Hello nice2care,

May I ask you to clarify what you mean by "switching the pedal", please?

Kind regards,
James
x

Wasn't it the opposite?
i.e. the volume became louder when the damper pedal was pressed.

Kind regards,
James
x

I was referring to releasing the pedal and press it again or just releasing it. The sympathetic resonance will disappear as expected but also the actual note will fade away faster.

Would you be able to record it? Feels fine on my Novus... the sympathetic resonances disappear and take a lot away with them, but that seems fine to me. I'm guessing your old digital piano does not have sympathetic resonances.

That's correct, called a blooming effect. That's what I hear with my N2.

Surely, you meant to say.... a blooming defect?
There’s no acoustic piano on earth that ‘blooms’ that way.

On a real acoustic piano, if you press the pedal immediately after striking the notes, there is a very subtle "blooming" effect, which is more noticeable if you are playing a lot of notes or playing loudly.

However, if you change the pedal while notes are sounding, it kills off some of the sympathetic resonances from the other strings that were not directly hit by the hammers at that moment. Professional pianists will sometimes flutter the pedal for the purpose of quieting a chord after it's played or to reduce its sustain.

Both are normal behaviors. Sometimes in the digital/hybrid piano realm, the introduction of a new feature to better depict the instrument's realism compared to an acoustic grand piano is overemphasized. That's possible here, too.

Yes, that would be a better way to describe it! We are currently shopping for an acoustic grand - that will fix the problem

Oh, I am very aware of this behavior, terminal, but the AvantGrand (old version) does a terrible job at this; so bad that Yamaha decided against this (d)efect for the new models. Same goes for TRS (Tacky Rumbling Solenoids); Yamaha all but eliminated it from the N3X. Still, according to Harpuia, it sucks!

Thanks for the clarification, bSharp; I’m glad you’re getting an acoustic, but don’t lose faith in ‘hybrids’ just yet; I promise you they will get better!

I forgot to try to test it this morning, but my feeling is that this would be much better explore in a controlled manner over MIDI. Maybe someone can create a MIDI file that plays a sustained chord at a given note-on velocity, and another file that does the same but also flutters the sustain pedal repeatedly. When played back through the NV-10, the resulting audio files SHOULD have a decay for the chord that is more or less similar. That would eliminate any psychoacoustic bias from hearing a chord swell and bloom repeatedly.

Now that I think about it, it may be interesting to have the same chord played with the sustain pedal held down throughouot. Would a chord played with sustain pedal held down last slightly longer than an unsustained chord, since the free vibrations from neighboring strings and partials might contribute additional energy to the original chord's strings?

I'm not an acoustic engineer or anything like that, but I often wonder how does a speaker replicate the sound produced by a string that is 5 feet long? The air all along that string is vibrating, how does a point speaker replicate that?

No problem. I was actually responding to the OP and B-sharp, but I think I typed my post while you were submitting yours, so it looked like I was responding to you...

So I just tested this very quickly on my NV-10, and I do not notice odd.

If the damper is down when I strike the chord (not just a high register chord, any chord), there is a diminishing of the bloom if I lift the damper, that's to be expected because the dampers falling will stop any sympathetic resonances from the non-held keys.

If I hold a chord and then feather the damper pedal, I don't notice any abnormal decay from the held chord, it seems to progress completely naturally to me ears.

5 feet long speaker?

It is the soundboard that is mostly responsible for producing sound from the vibrating string.

The driver of the speaker could be considered a 'point', but drivers are usually mounted in an enclosed case or a large board. If that case or board is sufficiently large, the 'point' source can efficiently create low frequencies. It can compress the air above it at low frequencies, because air can not flow around it.