Nord User Forum

jazzy, you forget harpsichords...many of us play them as well as acoustic pianos..

I can't possibly believe that you truly believe what you just wrote. So you don't hear the difference between a 6 foot grand and the piano patch in your Nord? Come on!! Anyways I'm done here, I don't think we'll ever see eye to eye on this. There's a lot more to a piano then what you describe. If what you say is true then there would be no difference in the sound of an upright and a grand. I don't know about you but I sure hear a difference. And the person sitting behind me would hear a difference and the person sitting 100 feet away would hear a difference. Space is a huge part of what your ear actually hears. If you've figured out the magic formula to recreate space I think you sell your ideas and become a very rich man!

If it goes into your ears and you can hear it, it can be generated by a suitable HIFI set of speakers.

The problem here is lack of hifi speakers.

When you talk about space, you are talking about reflections, again, easy to achieve.

I'm very interested in speaker design and my own take on it is that you need bloody great big infinite baffle speakers. I have a set of old Studio Monitors that Wharfedale made a long time ago and they are pretty good. It's all very well having all this kit and then whacking it through something with 5" woofers! When I say HIFI, I don't mean something getting there, I mean bloody great big well designed speakers stretching into infrasound as well!

Naturally, sampling such a thing is a huge task and then going about orientating the speakers to reproduce it is another. When you consider miking a leslie and how that is played back in stereo, it's a wonder it sounds different.

I have yet to run the Nord through a really good set of speakers turned up to the right volume. It's pretty good running them through some HIFI monitors I have (the wharfedales need new crossovers) but no cigar. You can't compare a 15" leslie driver to something you'd run your radio through.

hey now we agree on something. Yes, speakers (HiFi) are a huge factor in the sound that is delivered to your ears. I really like the ProAc line for their transparency. I still don't believe though that all of the nuances of a real piano can be reproduced in "real" time through any kind of synthesis. I love playing old records because their dynamic range was much closer to what our ears can actually handle opposed to the CD's or MP3's that we're listening to now. Compression is a part of life I guess. Now if I could play a good piano sample through some bad-ass HiFi speakers it could probably get close to a record of the same piano (assuming you have a killer amp and great speakers). I think some of the responsibility of the sounds has to go to the amp designers as well. The amp is just as, if not more important than the sound you're sending to it. Maybe keyboard manufacturers could work hand in hand with amp manufacturers to offer the best possible combination for the most accurate reproduction of any instrument.

jazzystu wrote:If it goes into your ears and you can hear it, it can be generated by a suitable HIFI set of speakers.

Is there any set of HIFI speakers that are completely flat and completely distortion free through the entire frequency range (including harmonics) and the entire dynamic range of an acoustic piano? I don't think that exists.

jazzystu wrote:When you talk about space, you are talking about reflections, again, easy to achieve.

From a single pair of speakers, it is not so easy to accurately achieve that from a wide range of listening positions (and of course the listening room itself adds its own reflections, originating from the speaker locations themselves).The most accurate way to go is probably to place the speakers only as far apart as the width of an actual piano. And then perhaps the samples should be recorded at a like distance from the piano, in an anechoic room.

Though the best solution might be to do the whole thing through a binaural headphone system!

If I remember rightly, Hammond was quite obsessed with getting the movement you note with pipe organs. Pipes in different places, greater "spread". Same with a piano. However, if you were to replace your ears with microphones and then make a stand which would stop your head moving and then sample the piano and play it back through the ultimate set of speakers, it would be near enough!

You would get to the point where people probably couldn't tell the difference.

Let's face it, people in studios rig their faultless gear up to the most perfect recording gear and then some pleb comes along and plays it through a car stereo!

We are not at the level of perfect yet, but we are certainly in the almost good enough territory!

anotherscott wrote:

zahush76 wrote: You completely miss the point, if i may say so.
...
This is about this thing called "PRIORITY".

It sounds like you actually missed my point. It could only be about "priority" if you know that the people who created these other samples we've been getting are in fact people who could have instead been employed to create a Rhodes sample or whatever, and we do not know that to be the case. Maybe some of these other samples have been licensed from a company who already had done them. Maybe the expertise required to do multi-layer samples in the .npno format (and get them down to a Nord-reasonabl size) requires they use different people than those who did these simple .nsmp samples. The assumption that releasing these other sounds is somehow delaying new .npno EPs/clavs is what I feel is unjustified, and not rationale to complain every time they release a new synth sound.

That's a pretty impressive defence & self persuasion mechanism you got there. Almost as if you work for clavia or have been hired as their lawyer or something.
It's all excuses.

I'm sure that it isn't that difficult to apply the right information to the Npno process.

They've done it lots and they've done it fine with normal pianos.

Sadly, I think they are metering things out gradually and that's that. We will have them at some point in the future.

If Korg or Roland were to announce something impressive, you'd probably see them get their fingers out of their arses.

zahush76 wrote: That's a pretty impressive defence & self persuasion mechanism you got there. Almost as if you work for clavia or have been hired as their lawyer or something.

It was just logical thinking. But it is common, when such is irrefutable, to resort to the ad hominem!