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Hello I found that decreasing the amount of voices really takes away all that crackling. I run 400 and it sounds fine to me but I may be missing something. Room position sounds best to me but sometimes sounds to distant. MooganDavid

Hi Mac if you like the vintage D you'll love Embertone 1955 Concert D. I took the chance and purchased lite and the next day I was ordering the full. I think I would have paid the 200.00 just for lite it's that good. Totally pleasing tone that has alluded me for years. I hardly use my Garritan anymore but they sure compliment each other. Close and Hammer mike positions blended together give me a sound I love! Fun and inspiring to play. MooganDavid

*stomps & pouts*

The Embertone Walker was next on my list to try, just for the Steinway sound and the actual una corda samples. I’m sad to have seen so many issues reported in this thread.

Does anyone know if these issues reported through this thread have been repaired, e.g. pedal issues, inability to handle playing with lots of notes & sustain, etc.?

I *really* love the sound of this one, but I just can’t see spending the money on something that’s going to have basic pedal issues or a limit on how many notes you can play.

FWIW I don't have any issues at all with the voice count unless I'm using the "HQ+" pedaling mode these days. Eco and HQ are totally fine for me. Not that I'm playing Liszt, but you don't need to be able to play the transcendent etudes to hit a bunch of notes fast. So it seems to be some specific setting that makes it bad for some people. My PC isn't that powerful.

I am still tweaking my velocity settings to get the best response, but even though I'm not ready to make embertone my only library, I just can't get rid of it either. Nothing out there sounds like it

@Taushi Embertone has a 7 day return policy, and if you don't want to spend much, Imo the Lite version is a very good reflection of the full version (which you can upgrade to), other than the lack of una corda. They are also good about license transfers if you want to sell down the road, as I was recently able to transfer my Lite license to a friend with no hassle.

You might feel differently being far more skilled than I, but I'm currently torn between the embertone and VSL. I think the embertone's resonances are more realistic, and the una corda samples are spectacular (VSL's fake una corda is useful in a pinch but not even on the same planet in terms of realism). I also give embertone a slight edge in it's staccato and release behavior with one exception noted below

My main criticisms with it are:

* The dynamic range is tricky to get right. By default, the instrument has too little of it. Embertonr told me the "RAW+Unprocessed" settings has the "real" dynamic range of the piano but I find it hard to believe that's accurate compared to the VSL or Garritans out of the box. It's especially noticeable in the bass, although that makes it easier to balance the left and right hands for most music.

If you turn up the dynamic range sliders from default, the key off noise becomes super loud at quiet velocities unless you turn down the release samples, but then that kills some of what I like the most about the piano. So it's a bit of a balancing game and I'm not sure I've found universal settings that work for every piece yet.

*In HQ and HQ+ mode, sometimes quick pedal changes cause a bug that keeps some notes ringing longer than they should.

*There are some stray notes that are louder than others which vary by microphone.

*The Room mics don't actually have that much of the room in them, and the built in reverbs are just okay. I highly recommend external reverb (convology XT is a good free one).

*Mixing multiple mics is tricky. I prefer to use one mic at a time.

But it just sounds SO good, and I don't have the same performance issues lots of people seem to.

I fixed my Embertone Walker too. But I'm a beginner and don't play loads of notes unless I'm testing! I did suffer a pedal up problem killing voices too quickly until I got my setup correct. A quirk of the Embertone is that it seems that it doesn't replace repeated sustained notes. Instead it stacks the voices. What I mean is, pedal down and keep playing a few different notes again and again. The voice count goes up and up? The Embertone plugin doesn't know how to limit voices correctly without cutting off the wrong ones and making bad sounds. If you configure Kontakt to cull voices it doesn't choose the right ones and again you get bad sounds. The solution is to set Kontakt -> preferences -> engine -> CPU overload protection to Disabled. Then play tons of voices till you max out (1 core of) your CPU and you hear crackles. Eyeball the number of voices. Then set the max number of voices below that number. Now it doesn't overload, and Kontakt will kill the correct / oldest voices and it plays fine. Eco mode is less vulnerable to this problem, but if you setup as I described even the HQ+, sustain samples, it all works fine.

That you SO much for this detailed review. I think I’m going to just go ahead and try it. I’ll just put it on my credit card and if I hate it, I’ll just eat the cost of it as a few monthly payments. Like you, I love the resonances and the close-feel sound. VSL is absolutely stunning, but the focus there is a concert instrument. It excels at that. It can get really close to a “piano in the living room” sound if you use the close mics, but there’s something to be said about other VSTs like the Production Grand, the Imperfect Fazioli, and the Embertone that seem to focus on the “very close feeling that highlights all those resonances and even the physical/mechanical sounds. It makes it feel alive and personal. (I’d love it if VSL did a “close” focus instrument with the same technology they use for their other stuff. I think it’d knock everything else out of the water).

So yeah, I’m gonna just try it. If I hate it, I’ll count it as a loss, but I feel like I’m going to like it for what it’s for, when I want that really intimate sound, especially on some of the more lyrical pieces.

I’ll keep your settings suggestions in mind.


Thank you as well for these AWESOME suggestions! The apparent legendary CPU usage of this program has been a concern of mine, so I’m going to implement the suggestions you and napilopez gave and see how it does for me.

If you're on windows, makes sure to list the Embertonr Walker's folder as an exception as well. At the very least, it makes it load much faster, but I think it helped me with my initial CPU issues too.

Also Taushi, have you tried the Production Grands Steinway? I'm very curious about it but the demo doesn't tell me enough. I do like the sound with the release samples turned up, but want to feel the balance throughout the range.

Just FYI, Embertone will let you return the Walker for a full refund within 2 weeks of the original purchase date, so if it doesn’t work out you won’t have to eat the loss.

I bought it last year on sale, but after a week of playing around with it decided it wasn’t for me (CPU performance and playability issues as others have mentioned, plus I found that I didn’t really care for the slightly out of tune character of the instrument).

I just sent them an email with my registration code, deleted the files from my hard drive, and they issued a full refund within a couple days - no questions asked.

Wish more companies would offer policies like that.

Sigh. You were ABSOLUTELY right about everything. The dynamic range is so odd. It seems it’s always either ppp-f or mf-fff. You can’t seem to access the entire dynamic range at the same time. There seems to be no way to properly adjust the velocity curve like with VSL or almost every other VST I’ve used that has a velocity curve editor. With this one, it seems you just move the playable range on a slider and the volume of the playable range. But it’s totally not authentic. You can never access the entire playable dynamic range, ppp-fff, at the same time.

And that sucks because it does have some great samples, with a lot of that great physical noise and resonance that those of us who want a quality “up-close” authentic piano sampler want.

You’re also right that everything from middle-c down seems very quiet in comparison to everything from middle-c up. Unrealistically so, especially considering that on a real piano, the bass notes are generally louder than the treble & high notes.

And you were totally right about the release samples, too. Unless you have them turned all the way up, it has a very unusual behavior where the release just seems to drop out, almost like you’re playing a bass instrument or something.

There’s also some noticeable out-of-tuneness. Not terrible, but definitely sounds like the piano hadn’t been maintained recently or they didn’t tune it before recording. Definitely a lived-in piano, which is great for some styles of music, but not so great for others.

The Una Corda is awesome, but, hard to really appreciate it with the other issues.

Playability would be great if it wasn’t for the lack of full dynamic range. If you could access all 36 layers at once, it’d be nice.

Interestingly, I didn’t have any issues either in terms of CPU unless I tried to run all six mics at once, and even then, only with extremely complex music. I tried a mix of about three mics, and still got good play out of it. I think I could probably settle to one or two also. I liked what running all six mics brought to the sound, though; a more complete representation.

So, now I’m kinda torn. The good seems balanced out by the bad, lol. I’m gonna keep it a bit more & play with it to see if I can find a setting I like, but I may just return it & save that up for some of the other “up-close” samplers I have my eye on.

I haven’t tried the Production Grands, but it’s on my list. However, for the price and the fact that they don’t offer return, it’ll be a while before I try it. They offer a demo, and I’m curious to try it, despite the fact that it lacks the velocity layers & complexities of the full version. I figure if the demo is good, then the full version will be even better, but it’s hard to know if your system will be able to handle the full version when the demo version is a limited, less powerful version on a completely different software (sforzando versus Kontakt).

I’m thinking I’ll just try the demo in a few days and see how I like it.

It’s definitely another one that has that great super up-close, authentic, player-perspective, physical-sounds-and-resonances vibe that I like.

I’ve also got my eye on the Imperfect Fazioli, but again, the price for the software plus the full Kontakt rivals the price of VSL’s full versions. But unlike VSL, it lacks the very detail demos & examples to really help you make an opinion. I really wish companies offered demos or gave more comprehensive demos of their software. VSL is expensive, but at least their demos are huge and include videos of people playing.


Thanks for this! They do seem very user-friendly. I may be returning mine for the same issues you mention, despite the positive elements of it.

@Taushi -- I forgot to mention it in my other post, but make sure you use Kontakt's built-in velocity curve editor! Works with Kontakt Player too. It's been a lifesaver with the embertone, and other libraries even if it doesn't *fully* solve the problem but it gets me a lot closer.

In Kontakt, on the upper left of the window you'll see a button that says "KSP" tap that, select presets> Factory > Transform > Change velocity

You'll then see a velocity curve you can curve and draw manually as well. ProTip -- right click to draw a line over a range of velocities rather than trying to draw the fully thing manually. I think either shift or ctrl lets you select individual velocities too.

You can then select Save preset and load it up whenever you open the embertone. Or save a new Multi to load it automatically with the walker.

My suggestion: Set Embertone's "dynamic" velocity curve to be a straight diagonal line. Basically ignore that one and just use the KSP to adjust the dynamic response.
My KSP velocity curve looks a bit like the one your shared for the VSL steinway, just less agressive.

Then use the Volume velocity curve to taste.

Currently I'm expanding the volume curve dynamic range a bit beyond the default and giving it a bit of a concavce shape. I find this helps more realistically expand the dynamic range. For all my vdigital pianos I basically try to match the response to pianoteq, which is pretty much perfect for me


It's weird that those dynamic range issues exist because it was sampled from a steinway with a high end (supposedly) performance system.