How to reproduce sound of piano

Anyone else feel that best headphones do better justice
to piano than most speakers?

Headphones have very low distortion levels and only a handful of speakers are
designed such that they could begin to compete with $1000 headphones. I
mentioned the numerous distortion and dynamic compression problems in
conventional speakers above - a $1000 headphone playing at tiny output levels
close to the ear has a much easier job than a speaker. Remember the vast
majority of speaker drivers cost less than $100!!! (basically there is no contest
between excellent headphones and most speakers)

Shadorne,
How true, but I hate to have my head mimic a soundstage.

"If you were to hear what a piano like this actually sounds like in a living room, I don't think anyone here would be claiming that his system quite reproduces that sound."

I am not sure what your point is.

What we have is a hundred year old piano with a thick sound board, and sounds bold and robust. A Steinway Grand will sound smoother, and just as big. My Scintillas don't sound like my piano. They sound like the big grand piano recorded at some particular space in some particular manner.

Hello, Shadorne said a while back in this thread,"Let
me say you need a very clean waterfall plot."

What exactly do you mean by that? Also why do you want this? What does it mean ? And how do you get this? How do you identify this?

The best is to give a classic example - the Quad 57. Because the cumulative spectral decay plot (waterfall) is so clean in the mid band this became a famous speaker - despite many other shortcomings. Most people will say this is one of the best sounding midrange around.

The reason is that the subtle timbre of the piano is not MASKED by driver resonance.

IMHO, it was a sad day when the industry began widely adopting lightweight metallic drivers with small motors - most of these designs ring badly and require "notch" filters to try and limit the ringing. Most people do not realize that it takes only a ringing at one frequency within several octaves to completely mask all the other subtle sounds within that band. It is called "masking" and has been studied extensively - it happens when one sound at a certain frequencies "masks" other sounds across an entire band or range of normally audible frequencies and SPL levels - this scientifically proven effect is used to compress audio files in the MP3 standards (basicaly they remove sounds that they "know" you can't hear anyway and make the compressed audio file much smaller).

Shadorne, you are right to point out overworked tweeters will smear over subtle resonances.

The Scintilla has yards of tweeter that never sound overworked. Highs flow off the ribbons naturally.

The mid ribbon is married to the tweeters so one cannot listen to one without the other. The big bass is musical into the 20s frequencies. All of that adds to a very great piano imitator.

In fact, the reason I own Apogee Scintillas is because of a fateful day listening to one in the 80's. I wandered about the listening room trying to convince myself I wasn't listening to some unseen piano player. I gave up, until I saw a Glodmund turntable spinning a record.