How does solo piano help you evaluate audio gear?
A pianist friend just recommended this article and pianist to me, knowing that I'm presently doing a speaker shoot-out. My question to you all is this:
How important is solo piano recordings to your evaluation of audio equipment -- in relation to, say, orchestra, bass, voice, etc.? What, specifically, does piano reveal exceptionally well, to your ears?
Here's the article:
https://positive-feedback.com/reviews/music-reviews/magic-of-josep-colom/
To test imaging and soundstage nothing beat this in my collection, the sound of some voice comes often from my back or from my left ear or right ears, sometimes the voice walk around me....It is intimate like with headphones but out of the head...I used it much tuning my room with my devices to translate these sonic effect in my room... The musical interpretation is the best for this work...The recording engineer was a genius for sure...
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IMO, too much is made of the idea that piano is the most difficult instrument to record. EVERY instrument, including the human voice, has unique tonal and other characteristics that make it uniquely difficult to record/reproduce. The more familiar one is to the full range of sounds and tonal nuances that any given instrument is capable of, the more that one is able to identify tonal deviations and so we deem that instrument “the most difficult”. If one must be picked as most difficult and useful I would agree that it is the human voice. It is true that the piano’s very wide frequency range makes it uniquely difficult to record, but the piano does not have nearly the wide variability of possible tonal colors and effects that other instruments are capable of. Even the often mentioned dynamic range of the piano is still narrower than that of other instruments. The human voice, trumpet and even the clarinet are capable of wider dynamic range than the piano. A clarinet can play much more softly than the piano and maxes out at around 114 db, while the piano’s volume maxes out at around 100 db. The human voice ups the ante by maxing out at around an astounding 125 db and is also capable of sounding in a faint whisper; all with incredibly varied possible tonal colors and textures. For me, recorded piano is most valuable for assessing pitch stability of turntables. The decay of recorded piano notes are a great test.
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But @Frogman- you have an advantage in that you know the range and color of the full orchestra at "full frequency bandwidth" for real, so you don’t need easy cues to assess home reproduction. You are also exposed to the real thing more than most people, I would guess. The most convincing piano recording I have is on an obscure label, Leo, and contains a blues/piano/voice thing. The piano sound is deranged. The rest is a matter of taste. This. I use piano as a reference because I know the instrument, but think the variations among individual instruments, as well as how the recording is made, may be variables that are obstacles to the piano sounding "real enough." I needed more gravitas in the bass including upper bass, and got it through a change of cartridge. The system is not perfect, each of our ways of judging things is dependent on a host of factors that go beyond sophistication in the hi-fi marketplace. You mentioned decay. That ambient space, if well captured through mic set up and acoustics, is what I’m about. I know what a real piano sounds like (recognizing the variables). I am now able to hear bass with dimension in space, as well as some pretty convincing "down low" sounds which do not lack for volume. How real compared to a recording is an almost impossible subject. If the recording captures the energy of the performance, I’m often happy. |
A. you - an ordinary person will not get anything at all - you need a professional piano tuner ... Brodman - plays the piano perfectly ... but it's expensive and usually plays other music in the middle ... |
