What is a good piano reproduction???

[c1ferrari]

The "brightness" is the indicator that the rig has the grunt to deliver BIG sound...

 

[c1ferrari]

... the telltale signs are what matters, not "the overall impression" ...

I should think the "telltale signs" and "the overall impression" would be a complementary analysis. YMMV.

 

[RayDunzl]

Ok, I'll try one, even though this is supposed to be a piano thread.

These speakers are a size smaller and a generation earlier than my mains

Maybe from 1993 or so.

 

[RayDunzl]

Whaddaya know. The next one up has some piano.

These are a generation newer but the same size as my panels, about 15 years old.

 

[Cosmik]

There is no way that piano is limited dynamically!!

There is a minimum speed at which the hammer can strike the string below which you get silence, and a maximum at which you'll start to damage it. And if you record the piano as a member of the audience would hear it, the ratio of reverberation to direct sound is increased. I don't like recordings of pianos where the mic is too close.

And as regards my suggestion that the resonances in the sound board mean that it would be impossible to hear similar colouration in your system, here is a measurement of it:
https://www.speech.kth.se/music/5_lectures/conklin/howdoes.html

Just as a single violin or guitar would be useless for assessing a system's colouration, so is a piano. Only a mixture of sources can provide the clues that show that you are listening to a neutral system.

Edit: in speech this is known as the "formant". i.e. there is a fixed filter applied on top of variable excitation waveforms. If your system has an unwanted 'formant' and your single instrument in the recording has a fixed 'formant', you can't tell which is which by listening to the result.

(I do play the piano BTW - my piano is about 100 years old, so maybe not quite as loud as a modern one)

 

[fas42]

I should think the "telltale signs" and "the overall impression" would be a complementary analysis. YMMV.

Depends at what stage the refinement of a system is at. The telltale signs count at the beginning, overall impression well down the track. As an example, I'm working on sorting out a NAD based system, old components. When first fired up I was impressed by good signs of dynamic competence, a lot better than many pricey bits of gear in retail stores I had heard lately. But the overall impression was Yuck!! Dirty, edgy, midfi sound - "overall impression"? Poor!!

I've heard tubey systems which would offend no-one - but the telltale signs are that too much doctoring of the sound is happening - it would require too much re-engineering to 'rescue' the system ...

 

[fas42]

Just as a single violin or guitar would be useless for assessing a system's colouration, so is a piano. Only a mixture of sources can provide the clues that show that you are listening to a neutral system.

Overall, yes. But the distinctiveness of the acoustic piano sound is ingrained in most people, it immediately registers as realistic, versus a poor imitation. As an example, the piano in Ray's video above misses the mark, the attack of the leading edge of the note is not up to scratch.

 

[fas42]

https://dl.orangedox.com/i0D1EHQHOynolfTmpc

You can download this. Grabbed the mp3 of the audio off that video. Looked at Ray's spectrum of it. Figured the mic gave up around 300 hz. So I boosted 300-75 hz by 12 db/octave. Rolled out of the boost to shelve it at 50 hz and below. This was just a guess from the graph and how vidcam mics work. Sounds more reasonable as a first guess. I spent maybe 60 seconds doing this.

The other thing apparent looking at this in Audacity is the video cam employed AGC of course. Frank can automatically compensate for unknown video cam mics running unknown types of AGC to access the dynamic portrayal of the entire rig. No reason to think AGC would mess with the telltale signs of dynamic capabilities.

Nicely guessed, Dennis. I found a very short sample of that track, on the website of the recording company, and compared the corresponding sections with the video - and, yes, the bass is down tilted by about the order you mention. Also, AGC did trigger on major chunks of the track - and very understandably so: the transients on the original are ferocious, no conventional recording studio could resist lopping these off a bit.

Apart from that, the subjective sense of a section where AGC wasn't heavily in the picture nicely correlated - interestingly, a lot more life in the YouTube clip, the impact of the room echos was abundantly clear, and the murmur of people talking in the background balanced the anechoic chamber feel of the original.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Nicely guessed, Dennis. I found a very short sample of that track, on the website of the recording company, and compared the corresponding sections with the video - and, yes, the bass is down tilted by about the order you mention. Also, AGC did trigger on major chunks of the track - and very understandably so: the transients on the original are ferocious, no conventional recording studio could resist lopping these off a bit.

Apart from that, the subjective sense of a section where AGC wasn't heavily in the picture nicely correlated - interestingly, a lot more life in the YouTube clip, the impact of the room echos was abundantly clear, and the murmur of people talking in the background balanced the anechoic chamber feel of the original.

Did you download the file I EQ'd? Just curious about that.

 

[fas42]

No, not as yet. Will do so - hang in there!

 

[gizmo]

I imagine the piano is taken specifically as cotton test for proper reproduction. A good reproduction is one that largely eliminates the mechanical factor own artificial sound generator in front natural generator that takes place in time / space given. The perfect coordination and integration of different rhythmic structures or inflections in different melodies are evident in an instrument like the piano, regardless of the quality of the recording.

However we must not forget that this depends primarily on the correct interaction of speaker / room product modal behavior of the room. From there if we could talk about the special ability of certain products that get translated into musical language simple sound through mastery of accent, universal unit of measurement of musical language. Body language is the perfect accent and fluency of sound reproduction, thus counting with the added plus in terms of communication skills

regards
gizmo

 

[Frank Dernie]

My wife is a musician. I bought her a Steinway Model-B grand piano for her birthday in 1990. It is in a room as far from where my hifi is as we can get in the house so she can practice and I can play Mahler without us hearing each other...
My experience with the sound is that the microphone, and its position relative to the piano makes more difference to the sound than anything I do with my hifi system.
Since I started sound recording in the 1960s this has been my experience. Hifi systems sound different to each other but all are at the mercy of the person who made the recording, and in recent decades the mix. I still prefer recordings simply made using 2 microphones to others. IMO the only benefit of extra microphones is lees background noise and the ability to manipulate the balance artificially.

The dynamic range of the piano is very big, very few domestic systems can cope. If the quiet bits are at realistic level the loud bits will be way above the linear part of most domestic speaker's range.

In my hifi room I have horn speakers and conventional-ish cone speakers. I would say the cone speakers, which have high efficiency and an unusually wide linear dynamic range, sound most like a recording of the piano in the similar room at the other side of the house.
The horns sound more like listening to a piano at a greater distance in a concert hall.

The piano has a wide dynamic range, percussive and harmonic content, broad frequency response and the sound board gives a wide range of overtones. I think it is good for judging the SQ of a hifi system, but as ever the recording makes the most difference.

As usual this leaves the risk that we choose a system suitable for a favourite recording on audition, and this recording actually has an odd balance a natural recording won't sound good on it!
The constant conundrum.

 

[fas42]

The piano has a wide dynamic range, percussive and harmonic content, broad frequency response and the sound board gives a wide range of overtones. I think it is good for judging the SQ of a hifi system, but as ever the recording makes the most difference.

As usual this leaves the risk that we choose a system suitable for a favourite recording on audition, and this recording actually has an odd balance a natural recording won't sound good on it!
The constant conundrum.

My experience has been totally at the opposite end. When a system is fully optimised then quite often a recording that stands out on a more conventional "audiophile" system will become relatively ordinary, and those albums which are extremely complex, prone to sounding messy, will rise dramatically in appeal. Particularly 'useful' is that all those "boring" tracks suddenly make sense - you understand why the musicians went to the effort of recording them, why they got a buzz out of creating, putting them down. The vista of music you can enjoy, rather than just have them creating some background filler, expands enormously.

The rule is, the better the system, the more every recording "works" - if the right approach is taken, then it's a 100% win situation ...

 

[Thomas savage]

Piano is a tough one as it can be ruined in the post production mastering etc.. A emotive piece can be rendered bland, nothing in this case to do with mic or playback system..

Rudy Van Gelder, Was guilty of this.. Ruining some of the more nuanced charms of many a piece.

 

[c1ferrari]

My wife is a musician. I bought her a Steinway Model-B grand piano for her birthday in 1990. It is in a room as far from where my hifi is as we can get in the house so she can practice and I can play Mahler without us hearing each other...
My experience with the sound is that the microphone, and its position relative to the piano makes more difference to the sound than anything I do with my hifi system.
Since I started sound recording in the 1960s this has been my experience. Hifi systems sound different to each other but all are at the mercy of the person who made the recording, and in recent decades the mix. I still prefer recordings simply made using 2 microphones to others. IMO the only benefit of extra microphones is lees background noise and the ability to manipulate the balance artificially.

The dynamic range of the piano is very big, very few domestic systems can cope. If the quiet bits are at realistic level the loud bits will be way above the linear part of most domestic speaker's range.

In my hifi room I have horn speakers and conventional-ish cone speakers. I would say the cone speakers, which have high efficiency and an unusually wide linear dynamic range, sound most like a recording of the piano in the similar room at the other side of the house.
The horns sound more like listening to a piano at a greater distance in a concert hall.

The piano has a wide dynamic range, percussive and harmonic content, broad frequency response and the sound board gives a wide range of overtones. I think it is good for judging the SQ of a hifi system, but as ever the recording makes the most difference.

As usual this leaves the risk that we choose a system suitable for a favourite recording on audition, and this recording actually has an odd balance a natural recording won't sound good on it!
The constant conundrum.

I've evolved to the point where a system's, within the confine of its environs, ability to resolve the source and therefore, to the extent possible, the artist(s)'s and producer(s)'s intent is a, if not -- the -- characteristic of a desirable system. For example, I heard a Beach Boys cover band, Papa Doo Run Run (?), where the music
was presented as a "wall of sound". Then, listened to a FIM jazz recording, "What a Wonderful Trio", where the liner notes expressed the location of the musicians and position of the mics (iirc), thus enabling one to envisage the soundstage. Finally, listened to the simple mic technique of Opus 3, "Cyndee Peters - Black Is The Color" via 15 in/s analog tape. It was this sequence of events that assisted in refining my understanding of the capability of my system, within the context of the listening space, and further -- critically analyzing other systems. YMMV.

 

[fas42]

No, not as yet. Will do so - hang in there!

Okay, now done. Yes, the difference is clear, initially ... like with all these sort of exercises, the more one listens to the piece, the more they blend into the same subjective experience - it becomes very confusing, very quickly.

Preferred the version without the bass EQ, actually ...

 

[Blumlein 88]

Okay, now done. Yes, the difference is clear, initially ... like with all these sort of exercises, the more one listens to the piece, the more they blend into the same subjective experience - it becomes very confusing, very quickly.

Preferred the version without the bass EQ, actually ...

Well, the voices make it clear the video cam doesn't even get down to the fundamentals of the male voice. Maybe it could do with less EQ or a different turnover point. The videocam has an obvious infidelity. A massive low frequency loss. So if you prefer the raw vid feed (which we know has suffered a large amount of high pass filtering) I am not sure this supports the ideas you are putting forth here. The true raw feed would have rather good response on the low end from a condenser mike. So how does this very adulterated recording become the one to prefer? Very strange.

Maybe someone else will listen to both and give an opinion.

 

[fas42]

Where I actually listened to was the start of the music track, for the first 25 secs or so - because that is what's available on the recording's website - the fact that there was less low end information made it easier to hear how the higher frequencies were fairing, and effectively more insight into low level detail - the echo of the listening room is easier to distinguish. You might say I'm no fan of warmth in sound because it's more cuddly or anything like that - I prefer to hear everything that's going on - and 'intensity' in sound is delivered by the frequencies above the bass.

Over a decade ago, I was halfway through getting really good sound back again - and I was using a decent but nothing special National integrated amp. The usual chrome plated, with dozens of controls, including bass and treble, beast - I worked out a procedure for extracting the best out it ... and noted something very peculiar: when it was working well those boost and cut controls became subjectively irrelevant, swinging them madly from one end to the other had close to zero impact on the experience of hearing the music - when it lapsed back to 'normal' sound, of course it was obvious how the boost and cut were impacting.

That "discovery" extended to other components, and audio sound in general - the rule is: the better the sound, the less relevant are any FR anomalies; conversely, if the slightest hiccup in the response is obvious then the system has quality issues. I'm sure many people wouldn't register hearing reproduction in this manner - but I certainly do ...

 

[Blumlein 88]

Where I actually listened to was the start of the music track, for the first 25 secs or so - because that is what's available on the recording's website - the fact that there was less low end information made it easier to hear how the higher frequencies were fairing, and effectively more insight into low level detail - the echo of the listening room is easier to distinguish. You might say I'm no fan of warmth in sound because it's more cuddly or anything like that - I prefer to hear everything that's going on - and 'intensity' in sound is delivered by the frequencies above the bass.

Over a decade ago, I was halfway through getting really good sound back again - and I using a decent but nothing special National integrated amp. The usual chrome plated, with dozens of controls, including bass and treble, beast - I worked out a procedure for extracting the best out it ... and noted something very peculiar: when it was working well those boost and cut controls became subjectively irrelevant, swinging them madly from one end to the other had close to zero impact on the experience of hearing the music - when it lapsed back to 'normal' sound, of course it was obvious how the boost and cut were impacting.

That "discovery" extended to other components, and audio sound in general - the rule is: the better the sound, the less relevant are any FR anomalies; conversely, if the slightest hiccup in the response is obvious then the system has quality issues. I'm sure many people wouldn't register hearing reproduction in this manner - but I certainly do ...

Absolute rubbish. Bizzaro world reasoning.

Further following your strange reasoning, my EQ would have no effect upon the result. You have indicated otherwise in contradiction to the ideas you have expressed.

 

[fas42]

You're confusing hearing a better quality of sound from one system compared to others, via a YouTube video being replayed over a normal laptop - with hearing something approaching convincing sound from a well tweaked rig, in the flesh. Very different situations. I expressly made that point above to explain why I don't get fussed about variations in FR in the way many people do - I "know" that such factors won't be an issue, at least for me, therefore I ignore them when I hear them second hand, as in this clip.

I'm merely using this Raidho show demo to point out that good dynamics can be more easily achieved these days - if you look back to that post, that's all I said - I'm not interested in trying to rate other aspects.