tough sounds to reproduce ???

To add to Tubegroovers's comment , the upper registers of the piano is tough to reproduce since mostly it lacks BODY and WEIGHT of the real thing. Real sound does not just float! Lower ones are the ones could be produced convincingly in a full range-warm system.

brass blatt

Nil...huh?
I have my Steinway B positioned between and a few feet behind my Parsifal Encores. I hear GREAT piano upper octaves from my EMC-1 MkII/AlephP/Aleph2s?Encore system.
It's the LOWER octaves that aren't the same!
A grand piano's upper octaves DON"T have "body and weight".
Quite the contrary. They're thin, short, and basically excite only a small portion of the soundboard.
The bass strings excite the entire soundboard, and thus launch a HUGE pressurewave into the room which no reasonable number of speaker transducers can replicate.
Although I enjoy full-scale piano recordings on my system
(Nojima's Liszt on RefRec comes to mind as a great one), it's not the same as sitting down and exciting a giant diaphragm when I stretch out on those big Brahms chords.
Additionally, the top octaves' propagation toward the player or listener is VERY variable as a function of listening position, head angle, lid geometry, etc.
The ONLY way my B sounds right in the upper octaves to me WHWEN PLAYING it in my room is when the lid is fully shut, but the front door is wide open, yielding a constant depth
full-width "window" or port, if you will.
Sorry to belabor this, but getting a great system to do piano top octaves is not that hard. Voicing the damned piano is MUCH harder! Cheers.

Why didn't anyone mention violins in a symphonic orchestra. When many of these are playing together I find this the most difficult to reproduce. I always listen to violins when auditioning new equipment and it quickly gives me a sense of how good the product is.

Subaruguru, I guess I need to listen live piano more often to confirm what you are saying about the upper registers. May be I have to re-listen some very well recorded piano works (ref recordings/mapleshade). Thanks for your elaborate reply.