4 ms·

Interesting one! For the time I played piano, I ended up buying myself 2 ADAM A7X monitors and played with Ableton's Grand Piano. I also downloaded a supposedly

Interesting one! For the time I played piano, I ended up buying myself 2 ADAM A7X monitors and played with Ableton's Grand Piano. I also downloaded a supposedly other library that allowed me to use sampled grand piano sounds which was supposed to improve sound quality. It, however, never ended up sounding quite as good as my brothers's simple 300€ Yamaha keyboard. Even after having trained my ears for many months, I still don't know why the piano sounds from my speakers just weren't as pleasing as what by bro's Yamaha produced.

jacquesm 5y ago
The modern Yamaha keyboards use samples from real pianos. In mine there is both a Yamaha and a Bosendorfer and both sound quite good. But being sample based they are essentially just playing back recorded sounds. Pianoteq generates the sounds using nothing but a bit of software and it is really most impressive.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  I've never been able to work out if Pianoteq uses physical modelling - modelling the strings and soundboard as the solutions of differential equations - or spectral modelling - overtone resynthesis, which is rooted in sampling but reassembles the harmonics in samples dynamically instead of playing back a fixed sample series at different rates. I suspect it's the latter, because there's a hint of detail missing in the way the overtones move.
  - matheist 5y ago
    The wikipedia article[1] says it's "Fourier construction" but without reference (that I can find) and without elaboration. At their website[2] they list some of their staff; I looked up research by one of their researchers and found a paper "Modeling and simulation of a grand piano"[3] which looks quite heavy on the physical modeling of strings and soundboard. I'd expect that to work better than spectral modeling because I think the latter would introduce (too much?) latency via needing to collect an entire spectral window (plus extra computation to compute the phases, and even then I don't think it could sound good enough?). Whereas physical modeling works directly in the time domain and there's a wealth of literature around it. See e.g. J. O. Smith III's waveguide synthesis work[4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pianoteq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pianoteq [2] https://www.modartt.com/modartt https://www.modartt.com/modartt [3] https://hal.inria.fr/file/index/docid/768234/filename/RR-8181.pdf https://hal.inria.fr/file/index/docid/768234/filename/RR-818... [4] https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/swgt/ https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/swgt/
javajosh 5y ago
This problem is similar to the one faced by photographers. Why do in-camera shots look so much better in one camera vs another? A big reason these days is the camera's default software post-processing matches your taste. I bet with a little fiddling (particular with things like eq, compression, reverb, maybe resonance - all of which Live has in abundance!) you could find a great sound. It's just easier because Yamaha has great taste in sound. (One day I swear I will get a C5!) The other thing that affects your experience, and that doesn't have anything to do with timbre, is latency. Ableton through a USB audio interface into monitors is going to take (much) longer than the onboard sound generation + speakers on a digital piano. It's going to add at least 20ms plus whatever time is required to compute the sound. Meanwhile any cheap digital piano is going to do better than that.
- Slow_Hand 5y ago
  I agree that unchecked latency (no matter how imperceptible) can sour or perception of an instrument's playability. That said, latency of 3ms is very attainable so long as your interface isn't a decade old. That's a very usable speed. Software instruments are usually about as quick as you'd ever need them to be (no latency). So just make sure your audio buffer is set low (32 - 128 samples) and that you're not doing any heavy DSP processing that's going to add extra latency. It takes some vigilance to do and it can be a pain in the ass to manage when you're trying to play the instrument in a CPU intensive session, but if you do it right you'll only get latency at the output stage (3ms).
  - javajosh 5y ago
    I have Live 11 on macOS 11.2.3 on an Intel 2.3GHz MBP and Live states output latency as 13ms for a 64 sample buffer at 44.1KHz sample rate. Apparently latency is reported by the audio interface driver itself, rather then measured, because live has a parameter to override that latency, including with negative values (using time travel?) It's something I should fiddle with, for sure. It would be nice to have playable virtual instruments!
    - jacquesm 5y ago
Dfiesl 5y ago
I guess the yamaha has dedicated DSP, it might also have some analog circuitry as part of the signal path. Both of these will change the quality of the sound coming out, potentially for the better. Also for some reason sometimes downsampling to 12bit gives a pleasing character as can be heard on some of the hardware samplers from the 90s. As for the sounds actually on the keyboard, its possible they were recorded from a different piano, with different mic placement and a different mic pre amp to the ableton sounds, all of which could potentially lead to a nicer sound being heard.
psd1 5y ago
Simple: good monitors aren't kind. Try hi-fi speakers that are more warm than detailed

jacquesm 5y ago

The modern Yamaha keyboards use samples from real pianos. In mine there is both a Yamaha and a Bosendorfer and both sound quite good. But being sample based they are essentially just playing back recorded sounds. Pianoteq generates the sounds using nothing but a bit of software and it is really most impressive.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
I've never been able to work out if Pianoteq uses physical modelling - modelling the strings and soundboard as the solutions of differential equations - or spectral modelling - overtone resynthesis, which is rooted in sampling but reassembles the harmonics in samples dynamically instead of playing back a fixed sample series at different rates. I suspect it's the latter, because there's a hint of detail missing in the way the overtones move.
- matheist 5y ago
  The wikipedia article[1] says it's "Fourier construction" but without reference (that I can find) and without elaboration. At their website[2] they list some of their staff; I looked up research by one of their researchers and found a paper "Modeling and simulation of a grand piano"[3] which looks quite heavy on the physical modeling of strings and soundboard. I'd expect that to work better than spectral modeling because I think the latter would introduce (too much?) latency via needing to collect an entire spectral window (plus extra computation to compute the phases, and even then I don't think it could sound good enough?). Whereas physical modeling works directly in the time domain and there's a wealth of literature around it. See e.g. J. O. Smith III's waveguide synthesis work[4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pianoteq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pianoteq [2] https://www.modartt.com/modartt https://www.modartt.com/modartt [3] https://hal.inria.fr/file/index/docid/768234/filename/RR-8181.pdf https://hal.inria.fr/file/index/docid/768234/filename/RR-818... [4] https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/swgt/ https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/swgt/

javajosh 5y ago

This problem is similar to the one faced by photographers. Why do in-camera shots look so much better in one camera vs another? A big reason these days is the camera's default software post-processing matches your taste. I bet with a little fiddling (particular with things like eq, compression, reverb, maybe resonance - all of which Live has in abundance!) you could find a great sound. It's just easier because Yamaha has great taste in sound. (One day I swear I will get a C5!) The other thing that affects your experience, and that doesn't have anything to do with timbre, is latency. Ableton through a USB audio interface into monitors is going to take (much) longer than the onboard sound generation + speakers on a digital piano. It's going to add at least 20ms plus whatever time is required to compute the sound. Meanwhile any cheap digital piano is going to do better than that.

Slow_Hand 5y ago
I agree that unchecked latency (no matter how imperceptible) can sour or perception of an instrument's playability. That said, latency of 3ms is very attainable so long as your interface isn't a decade old. That's a very usable speed. Software instruments are usually about as quick as you'd ever need them to be (no latency). So just make sure your audio buffer is set low (32 - 128 samples) and that you're not doing any heavy DSP processing that's going to add extra latency. It takes some vigilance to do and it can be a pain in the ass to manage when you're trying to play the instrument in a CPU intensive session, but if you do it right you'll only get latency at the output stage (3ms).
- javajosh 5y ago
  I have Live 11 on macOS 11.2.3 on an Intel 2.3GHz MBP and Live states output latency as 13ms for a 64 sample buffer at 44.1KHz sample rate. Apparently latency is reported by the audio interface driver itself, rather then measured, because live has a parameter to override that latency, including with negative values (using time travel?) It's something I should fiddle with, for sure. It would be nice to have playable virtual instruments!
  - jacquesm 5y ago

Dfiesl 5y ago

I guess the yamaha has dedicated DSP, it might also have some analog circuitry as part of the signal path. Both of these will change the quality of the sound coming out, potentially for the better. Also for some reason sometimes downsampling to 12bit gives a pleasing character as can be heard on some of the hardware samplers from the 90s. As for the sounds actually on the keyboard, its possible they were recorded from a different piano, with different mic placement and a different mic pre amp to the ableton sounds, all of which could potentially lead to a nicer sound being heard.

psd1 5y ago

Simple: good monitors aren't kind. Try hi-fi speakers that are more warm than detailed