Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Pianoteq is a miracle

Ok it just blows my mind. Every time I try a sample I go right back to Pianoteq. The Yamaha N3X samples are unlistenable for me.

I use a Schiit Jotunheim dac with hd800s which sounds a bit better than my audio box hd650 setup but both sound good.

My headphones are so poor that everything sounds good through them . . . .

I think that says alot of the greed or incompetence of DP manufacturers, as far as the sound generator is concerned.

I've been preferring Garritan CFX lately to the N1X piano sounds because the former is more inspiring to play. However whenever I try Pianoteq and then go to the N1X sound, I realize how much better the Yamaha internal sound is compared to Pianoteq.

I guess it's what you get used to. i loved the old AWM sounds on my DGX, and the clp 820S was particularly.nice. the sweetness of tone contrasted with the flatness yet realism of a mono sample which sounded uncannily like an older British grand we had in church, a Monington and Weston.

Garritan CFX is a bunch of noisily recorded samples to me, while Pianoteq is a world of fully playable, real live grands.

I've not heard any noise in the Garritan. But maybe age limits my high-end hearing, thereby defeating the noise.

But it does still sound like a piano. There's nothing fake or synthetic about it.

Pianoteq is just the opposite. The synthetic nature of its sound is very off-putting.

Either you like it or you don't. It does seem every new version brings some converts aboard. By version 12 MacMacMac will be one of them. So he has to live another 20 years to prove me wrong😉 😃

It might take twelve versions before Pianoteq gets it right. But I'm not holding my breath.

Disappoint me once, shame on you.
Disappoint me again and again and again and again, fuggetaboutit.

I've had an odd experience that some may find interesting. For the last year or so, I have been working too hard at trying to get the best piano sound from my VPC1 and the following VSTs: Pianoteq Stage, Garritan CFX, and VI Labs German Grand. The VI Labs German Grand eliminated itself from consideration quickly as it has no sustain, whatsoever, despite its very, very lovely tone.

I had been playing Garritan for about 2 years, and was increasingly growing dissatisfied with the shrillness of the sound. Over a lengthy period of time I made some very pleasing improvements to the tone, mainly by switching from studio monitors to a quality hifi system. However, I was still dissatisfied. I was slow to learn what it was I disliked, but eventually came to the conclusion that there were certain notes that, despite my efforts, were sufficiently different from their neighbors, that they distracted me while practicing. And, unfortunately, I became fixated on them.

So, in the last six months, I decided to revive my long abandoned Pianoteq, to see if the recent raves about it had any merit to them. Over about 5 months, I upgraded from 6 to 7, then bought the Petrof Mistral package, then learned about and updated to version 7.4. Over the course of this adventure, I did notice substantial improvements in the once unacceptable sound of Pianoteq. To give it a fair chance, I played it a lot. Early in the process, I even started a thread here devoted to collectively trying to squeeze the maximum sound quality from it. I soon abandoned the project, viewing it as a failure.

After the most recent changes, however (7.4 and the Petrof package), I was sufficiently satisfied with the sound that I could play it without the unacceptably negative experience i had always had before. However, I was still patently aware of what i considered to be its continued deficiency of fidelity to the actual sound of a real piano. Yet, somehow, I was enjoying playing it.

After much puzzling over the apparent contradiction, I have concluded that:

1. the fidelity of the sound was never my real concern, despite my treating it as such;

2. the amazing playability, the evenness of the volume, tone, timbre, and the consistent dynamic response across the keybed has made Pianoteq a joy to play despite the sound deficiency;

3. I was suffering somewhat from not knowing myself. All along, what had really been bothering me, despite my not recognizing it, was the distraction from playing that the uneveness in my Garritan CFX experience imposed upon me. i started to notice many episodes of being stopped in my tracks by an odd note sound while practicing, and started to realize that it was that distraction and the interruption of my practice that was bothering me;

4. I am still quite a beginner. I currently play pieces at the RCM Level 3 fairly fluently, and, by far, my primary goal and desire at this point is practicing and learning, rather than performing.''

5. At this point, the Pianoteq 7.4 is so smooth and responsive that I do not notice the sound deficiencies. I am just enjoying playing it so much, that I have not spent time in the last 5-6 weeks playing Garritan CFX.

So, despite being heavily fixated on sound fidelity, and still believing that Pianoteq is weaker than many sampled pianos in that regard, I have been enjoying Pianoteq 7.4 a great deal lately, and have no current plans to change pianos.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how long this will last! I hope I am right about my primary concern being successful practice and Pianoteq's smoothness being enough to keep me happy for a long while.

I don’t get the point of this thread. There are numerous threads about people praising Pianoteq. We got it already. There’s no need for separate threads. Imagine everybody creating their own thread about the miracle Garritan CFX is or VSL or Yamaha P45 or Casiotone.

And of course the Pianoteq threads attract the usual polarization. I consider this trolling to a certain degree.

I created this thread to share my sentiment about the significance and the scientific value of creating a very close approximation of the sound that a complex instrument like the piano projects. That is why I liked to an analysis article in the OP. I am not really a fanboy of any VST, that's silly. But that does not mean I should be blind to such a significant achievement.

We have discussed how Pianoteq works (including Modartt patents) a lot in the past. I don't see how that article adds anything new. Then what remains is your desire to create a thread for Pianoteq appreciation. That's OK but as I said it attracts the usual crowd of people praising and bashing Pianoteq, so it's not constructive IMO. And then again, Pianoteq appreciation threads should not be different than any other hardware or software piano appreciation threads. And there aren't many others. It's always Pianoteq. Yeah, it's fantastic! Now, can we move on?

To what? We may have to very subtly digress in order to forestall The Ken . . . .

Indeed these things do often not last forever and in practice you see people on this forum switch a lot between VSTs. I have multiple, but find myself gravitating mostly towards Pianoteq, for the reasons you mention.

A big (recent) added advantage is its light footprint. You can now run it on a hardware system under USD 100 (headless Raspberry Pi).

I would never even had any thought about any other VST if I did not read this forum. I would just be happy, happy, happy with my VPC1 and Pianoteq.
But, if I had not read this forum, I would not even have known about VPC1 and Pianoteq....

I realized that I can’t play any of the VST through the built-in N1X system, only in combination with the built-in N1X sound, and if I use the pianoteq along with timbre 1 or 2, it gives such pleasure that I don’t need anything else. Pianoteq adds more resonance and a realistic sound plume, I don't know what to call it correctly. And sometimes I just forget that playing digital piano.
Evgenii, have you tried mixing sounds, what is your impression? =)

I see your point. However, I have a simple question. Define constructive in the context of this sub-forum.

Well right now it is more deconstructing the reasons why Pianoteq is great or not great. I forgot already which

Now for me I come to realize that Pianoteq fits what I want in a practice VSTi piano. Playability and light-weight resources. It will be interesting to see how well Pianoteq does when it is released for the iPad crowd. If I had a super computer set-up at home I would have one of the major multi-Gigabyte libraries to play with. So glad we all have choices on software pianos.

Peace

If one views this forum as just a repository for useful information, then the redundancy you speak of is indeed a problem. Having multiple, scattered locations for clusters of sometimes identical, sometimes overlapping, sometimes partially related information would be counterproductive to the researcher looking for answers. Logically, the information would be sorted, classified, and catalogued to provide streamlined access to intelligent users who still have the rapidly disappearing capability to sort and classify.

But, if one also considers this forum to be a place for conversations among friends, even ostensibly idle conversations such as was hinted at by the title of this thread, then conversations like this have their place, and yield benefit to some of us. The process of collecting one's thoughts, refining one's ideas, and combining them into a coherent expression that can be heard and understood by others benefits both the listener/reader and the speaker/writer. For instance, in my most recent post, just a few posts above, I wrote about the process I went through as I attempted to solve the riddle of why I was enjoying Pianoteq while very unequivocally recognizing the deficiencies in its sound quality. Organizing that post helped me understand:
1. that I was essentially making a choice of playability over sound; and,
2. that this choice reflected my relatively "beginner" status, and the temporal prioritizing of playability over sound resulting from my current priority of learning and practicing over performing.

I will not pretend that these revelations are earth moving, will cure cancer, or put and end to war. But, thinking about them so as to put together a coherent statement about them has been helpful to me. And, there may be others reading who also wonder why they use Pianoteq when its sounds are not as nice as VSL samples.

I am quite convinced that you are a far more accomplished pianist than I am. Over the years of reading your posts, I have come to the conclusion that you play repertoire far, far more advanced than what I play. And, you have been recognized by many others for the same. When I look ahead, I can barely see on the horizon skills, techniques, and musical understanding that you probably mastered long ago. Perhaps it is just the nature of the great distance between our achievement levels that causes you to find topics such as this one naturally uninteresting, and, causes those of us at a far earlier stage in our development to find value in the tidbits and morsels scattered among the lines and spaces of these idle conversations.

For me, threads like this are sometimes helpful, and therefore, allright.