Virtual piano comparison

Strangely enough "that stuff" is working really well for this comparison, and is exposing the pros and cons of each VST. Forget chopin...

QuasiUnaFantasia Here are the two compositions rendered using one of my favourite (home made) presets for Ivory II Bösendorfer 225

This is a good preset, however I think the way I played the first file (Pianoteq with the default N1X touch curve) is a bit too hard for the Ivory preset and produces rather bright timbres. If I had played the actual Ivory preset in realtime, I would have changed the velocity curve or would have adjusted my touch to be lighter. However the second file that I played with Garritan is slightly softer, so I believe Garritan CFX is closer to Ivory as timbre mapping and I have played softer.

vagfilm Both files rendered in Reaper using VSL D274 (custom preset of ~ 60% close condenser mic and 40% mid decca mic). Your max midi value is around 100 (and usually it wavers between 30 and 60) so this is a well tamed D274.

I'm not sure why that is but I don't like that recording at all, sounds extremely nasal and more Pianoteq-ish than the Pianoteq Steinway D I used 😃 Hope you don't take that insulting... Are you sure something is not messed up because in the very beginning I though it was a mono file, it's very narrow, boxy and nasal. Very weird! Or maybe that's the real Steinway and is why people love Pianoteq 🤣 Go figure.

dore_m Here are renderings from my free Fazioli F308 library. I thought about also including renderings from other free libraries to make the F308 library sound really good…. ha ha.

Man, that's surprisingly good! It sounds almost like a binaural recording, the room reverb is very nice! I totally forgot that you asked feedback about that library and you just gave me one more reason to test it. Kudos for the really excellent result!

David B Here are Gene's midi files rendered with my VSL Bösendorfer Imperial Grand. I have the VSL touch curve setup for my N1X (I use the N1X default touch sensitivity and I think Gene does also) so it should sound the same if played on both instruments.

I comment on this last because it can easily be my favorite rendering among all of them. I'm split between whether I prefer the Garritan CFX rendering and this one. And I'm sure that if I played the VSL live, I would have played even better to control the half-pedal according to the resonance and the blend that is needed, etc.

CyberGene I comment on this last because it can easily be my favorite rendering among all of them.

Yep. The VSL Bösenderfer puts the SmackDown on everything else. 😀

It was my favorite also.

God Bless,
David

CyberGene Hope you don't take that insulting...

Of course not... To me it sounds good, and I prefer it to BI. Uneducated ear? In any case I may have messed up something in Reaper or in the preset. I will rerender it using a default velocity curve, and normalize the file afterwards.

vagfilm can you please listen to your files with headphones. Is it how you expect it to sound? Just to eliminate it's not something messed up in the rendering.

And of course we have different tastes about pianos, otherwise there wouldn't be Pianoteq and so many flame threads, and all the hundreds of sampled pianos 😃

🍻

To be honest, I put the file into reaper, render it, and upload, with only a marginal listening with the earphones. Did not use the good phones, but frankly it sounded ok...

I've re-rendered CG's Piano 1. MP3 is provided for folks with slower connections. I would love to hear what folks think about this render, including criticisms. It sounds amazing to me. 🤷‍♂️

navindra I've re-rendered CG's Piano 1. MP3 is provided for folks with slower connections. I would love to hear what folks think about this render, including criticisms. It sounds amazing to me.

Too shrill for me. I have to lower the volume when the upper-mid and upper register notes are played. To my ears the VSL BI has an even tone from top to bottom. It sounds good no matter what register is being played.

God Bless,
David

navindra Listen to what starts at 0:52, the scales. I think it still retains the metallic hollowness, becoming congested and muddy, almost like losing high fidelity and lacking the "wooden" ambiance of piano, instead becoming kind of synthetic. It's very difficult to describe that with words but listen to the VSL BI or the Fazioli rendering at the same spot to compare. Maybe it's a matter of taste after all. I can re-render that with Garritan too (since that was the PT MIDI file).

David B Hmmm, is this an improvement for you?:

CyberGene Thanks, I will have to listen closely and compare but I suspect this is not a quality that I can address.

navindra Hmmm, is this an improvement for you?

Improvement compared to what?

David B Your previous criticism regarding shrillness.

navindra Hmmm, is this an improvement for you?

Well, I think it is an improvement, although not enough but it is. What did you change? However after 1:20 the short scales that I do slightly higher still have that shrillness.

CyberGene Interesting. The EQ3 effect was boosting the higher freqs, so I just set it to flat (I guess I could have just disabled the effect entirely). I also decreased the Hammer hardness at Forte from where I originally had it at 1.28 to 1.08, making the tone mellower at higher velocities.

navindra I remember when I was beta-testing one of the Pianoteq versions (Grotrian, if I remember correctly). I would do exactly the same comparisons as this one and Philippe and the team would take it into account and would attempt to fix it in the next beta version. However we didn't know what they did, it was just an iterative approach and it was always they fixed something I didn't like in a version but then something else was worse elsewhere... I've been a little disappointed by that and is when I lost my faith in Pianoteq. I guess it may be possible that what Modartt do behind the scenes, if exposed to more people in an extended Pro version would be better. However they probably do the offline recalculations and whatever their secret sauce is.

navindra Your previous criticism regarding shrillness.

I'm not sure if it's an improvement. I'm not a fan of enchiladas no matter how my wife prepares them. 😀

God Bless,
David

I think the boxy sound was a conjugation of wrong setting of render volume with Reaper and lack of normalization. I redid the renders, and since the original file uses low MIDI values, I now used the linear MIDI velocity in the Synchron player. If there is "nasalness" here, I have been calling nasal to something else...

Among all of these, I like the original PTQ from @CyberGene which I have been able to reproduce with my demo from his MIDI. The original Garritan is a close second.

All the rest are quite distant from that sense of presence, power and delicacy of these two. And many have a rather questionable timbre that I don't like, particularly the VSL! The Fazioli is fantastic for being a free library, but I like PTQ and Garritan much better.

Actually, I initially tried rendering the MIDI file with PTQ Classic (rather than "Classical Recording", see the description in CG's post) and it sound horrible, that setting is definitely the worse of the group. Since everybody can do that rendering on their own with a PTQ demo, I'm not bothering to post it, but I encourage everybody to do a comparison between the two… For this MIDI file that setting is unacceptable IMHO (so much for all PTQ instruments and settings sound all the same: to me the best and the worse are the same PTQ instrument with only slight differences in settings…. Does anybody know, perhaps @navindra, what the differences are between the two?)

RIP I don't have any insights other than what they advertise. Classical may be better for a player perspective and Classical Recording for an audience perspective.

Personally, I started from Classical Recording and created a player perspective from it for my day to day usage.

Classical: This preset offers a BA micing perspective with a classical sound.
Classical Recording: This preset is recommended for classical recording. Equipped with 4 mics: BA micing plus 2 ambience mics.

The differences are fairly extensive, howeve:

navindra I don't have any insights other than what they advertise.

Thanks, even just that is more than I knew 🙂

navindra Classical may be better for a player perspective and Classical Recording for an audience perspective.

Frankly I don't hear much "difference" from that point of view in PTQ. The mono/recording/binaural/stereo do have a difference between them, but it's not as dramatic as e.g. recordings of Matthew Lien on YT when a binaural mic. Perhaps we can start a separate thread on this topic.

navindra The differences are fairly extensive, however:

I see, that's quite a long list and of some changes that are pretty dramatic for the timbre.

But you did not comment on my main claim:

RIP Among all of these, I like the original PTQ from @CyberGene which I have been able to reproduce with my demo from his MIDI. The original Garritan is a close second.

RIP I initially tried rendering the MIDI file with PTQ Classic (rather than "Classical Recording", see the description in CG's post) and it sound horrible, that setting is definitely the worse of the group.

What do you think about this rating? I know you must prefer yours, but do you hear such a large difference?

FWIW, I re-listened to it now, and as usual my impressions of PTQ change from one day to the other… Not as dramatically as in other cases for this test, but I would not call the difference so total as I did yesterday. I relistened to some of them and still VSL is definitely not my favorite, it sounds very synthetic to me 🤯