EB5AGV I should say it was close to perfect play, despite the high background stress the CPU and SSDs had. Kudos to PTQ for that.
HZPiano I highly regard Modartt for having such a demo version in the first place, and the superb ease with which one can obtain and install it.
I second these two!
HZPiano That is at a level way beyond almost all VI publishers, who often have zero tryout and zero refund provisions. Which is quite sad: if a purchased VI disappoints (and more often than not they do!), it is your tough luck, money and effort lost, and the publisher chuckling (or are they?).
That is exactly why I never gave them any of my money, 'nuff said
EB5AGV I tried to fully remove it and also to keep it at a very low level. Both settings were more pleasant to play IMO.
Do you mean you totally removed the hammer noise? That is funny, because (despite having a hybrid which has an action which makes plenty of noise), I always put it to maximum and find that the timbre is so much better sounding!
EB5AGV So, well, it seems there is plenty of room for improvement in Pianoteq
HZPiano Twangy, metally, and strangely nasal.
I agree with these two, also.
HZPiano The playability, fluidity slowly grew on me, surely something nice is going on there.
And with this too. I really like this point!
magicpiano sometimes I wonder if Pianoteq could sound better on a big cabinet DP like
I had the same wondering, and I crudely tried it, by using the soundboard of my previous grand piano. The tl;dr; version is: it did not improve a bit. It was exactly the same. After all, if you read the complain most people agree on regarding PT, it is about being too shrill and nasal. A soundboard, or reverb (since in other context that's what other people suggest) would not change those characteristics. In my opinion Modartt should and could find an easy fix: even I, with zero sound engineering experience can record my grand piano. Even a single note, alone, of this crappy recording has fantastically better timbre when heard in my headphones (timbre, not reverb or "body") than the best I can get out of PT (even their own recordings). These days anybody can do a spectral analysis (like Modartt themselves do on the "technology" tab of this page) and see the differences between the same note generated in PT and the recorded one(s). And I believe they do (in each instrument pack they mention something to the tone of "this piano has been modeled after piano such-and-such recorded in such-and-such studio"), but since we are here discussing about it, they obviously miss the mark. They should make the hard effort to better study this timbric difference and implement at least an option to change the timbre accordingly.
The nasal characteristics (for example of the oboe) comes from the presence of all harmonics often with a big presence of the high order ones. On the other hand, the "woody" sound (for example of the clarinet) is due to the prevalence of low-frequency odd (and let me stress, odd, not even) harmonics. Unsurprisingly, shrillness too is caused by too much emphasis on high harmonics. So I think this is an easy fix for them (unfortunately, this can't be done with a simple filter, because here "high" and "low" are compared to the fundamental and even a filter which gets the additional input of the MIDI note number, i.e. fundamental frequency, can't work unless you play only one note at the time -- especially but not only for that even-vs-odd part).
Heck, one day I may do this spectral analysis comparison myself… and perhaps even edit a single note generated with PT in a wav, by reducing the "offending" harmonics and see if/how the sound improves!
