I just bought a Steinway which sounds like a banjo.

adam817956 posts03-22-2021 4:57pm

I am a professional pianist and I feel that piano is one of the hardest instruments to really reproduce. Maybe I’m biased because its my instrument but I think because of its enormous range and complexity of interacting overtones, not just with sympathetic vibrations or the strings but interactions with the soundboard and cabinet, it’s really hard to get it right. That being said, I feel that 9 times out of 10, it’s the recording that gets it wrong, not the speakers or the electronics. Bad mic placement, bad EQ, bad mic choice all contribute to pianos not sounding like pianos. One of the micing techniques that has become en-vogue is to put two ribbon mics less than an inch away from the strings. Who listens to a piano like that with their ear inside the lid inches away from the strings! I’m sure speakers and electronics can contribute to the timbre of a piano from being off, but there are a whole slew of bad things that can happen before that sound reproduction gets to the hi-fi.

THIS 100%;
IMHO, most everything we do seems to be an exercise of making the best out of what we have no control over- the recordings;

At home I have a Yamaha baby grand piano, acoustic, and electric guitars. I have a high quality (44.1 KHz / 16 bit sample rate) portable USB recording/mixing product from PreSonus as well as the DAW to capture, process (mix multi-tracks, apply compression, etc) and accomplish final stereo mix down. When I record these instruments in their pure form with no compression and play them back, the sound coming from the speakers sounds properly harmonically rich and dynamic; In the case of the guitars it’s very much like being plugged into my guitar amps, and the piano sounds like it sounds to my ears in its space; If compression is applied to the recording you can hear these effects most profoundly in the playback; The piano loses its force and becomes more artificial sounding; Add in multiple tracks and various processing and what we have left is a far cry from the original instruments on their own; I’m amazed however how some recordings sound awesome and natural despite the homogenization of post processing;
These are simple tests anyone can do if so desired, and it proves that it’s (mostly) not our gear at fault but simply that what we struggle with, IMHO, is how we tune our systems to provide the average best response to the recordings we like;
Of course there are basic component mixing and matching loose rules to follow, such as try not to use an 8 watt SET on your Apogee’s, try not to use a Crown amp on your ultra sensitive $20K horn speakers;

I guess the point of this is, garbage in garbage out;

Happy listening

Jackleiss’ first comment is the best ever. To think some of these guys post none sense 50 times per day. 

x Brianlucey: I understood my mistake. Maybe I haven’t explained my idea well, or, because other people have understood it, you simply have not understood it. You’re posing the problem as if I wanted to synthesize the sound of a piano ... I don’t want to synthesize the sound of a piano. I would like a speaker to be able to reproduce all the dynamic range, all the timbre and all the spatiality of real instruments. To do this one must have the possibility to compare the original with the reproduction and if there is any discrepancy, precisely identify the origin of each problem. He must also have the possibility to compare all reproduction techniques and all reproduction media, trying to identify the exact peculiarities of each one and its repercussions in the reproduction phase. Today we have many recordings available but they are all made in circumstances so different from each other that we cannot become wiser because the combinations are too many. It would therefore be necessary to remake masters in controlled situations, so that each variation can be related to a repercussion and mold the construction of the loudspeaker around that information.
It’s completely useless that some of you tell me that they are satisfied with their system! You simply are the champions of the silly "brute force empiricism" approach.
If i buy a source, an amp and speakers, i turn them on (ohhh yes! One year of burn in, i know!), play a known track and no instrument sounds like it should then the silly "brute force empiricism" approach is the only way i can go...i can pass the rest of my life thinking about hifi gear and go for the endless the try-and error highway, hoping to find the three components that song wrong enough to copensate each one. All that in my space in my home...completely useless to listen to a speaker at the resellers shop because wen you bring the speaker at your home it sound completely different. It’s your space!, It’s your amp! the cables!
Imagine i go to buy a sax, i play it in the store, i like it, i buy it, i play it at home and i’m disgusted. I go back to the shop to complain and they tell me that it’s probably because i’m playing the sax in the wrong space with the wrong t-shirt.
It seems that we cannot understand each other. It’s fine.
I like to use my head to formulate theories; you’d rather use it to bang it on the "wrong hi-fi component" wall. Brute force empiricism, or how to share a problem and never its solution. Only a logically structured solution can be a shared solution.

I’d recommend a pair of Quad electrostatics. I have a pair of the 2905’s powered by an ASR Emitter II Exclusive, an Ayre DAC with a Bryston media player. The speakers are very temperamental in the way they are positioned but the results are beautiful when properly set up. The Quads shine where classical/art music is concerned and less so that with rock. Also, Steinway made a limited run of loudspeakers but they’re way too expensive and I don’t know how difficult it would be to even find a pair.

You're talking about the circle of confusion. There is no answer unless you standardize the entire production and reproduction chain. Unless that ever happens some recordings will sound great on your gear and some will suck. The closest I've come is using studio monitors that measure exceptional and DSP to compensate for room shortcomings.