There is no question that a well-recorded QUALITY piano in good tune played by a pianist who really knows and understands the piano, is an essential litmus test to appraise the tonal verity of an audio system. The same applies to reproducing the human voice, male and female alike, as well as "massed strings" and a full symphony orchestra.
ALL of these music sources must be as well-recorded as humanly possible - it can be very difficult sometimes to single out really GOOD recordings from lesser-quality ones to use as our be-all and end-all test recordings.
The pipe organ is another very difficult instrument to record well - and it is often overlooked as a means-test to judge the performance of an audio system. Like the piano and the symphony orchestra, the pipe organ possesses a very wide frequency and dynamic range. There are some splendid examples of organs found today around the world - for example, the organ that J. S. Bach himself knew well and played, the very beautifully restored (in 2000) instrument the renowned organ-builder Zacharias Hildebrandt (1688-1757) built between 1743 and 1746 in the Wenzelskirche in Naumburg, Germany. Bach himself highly praised Hildebrandt’s work, and there has recently been released on the Aeolus label an audiophile-grade recording of J. S. Bach’s Art of the Fugue ("Die Kunst der Fuge") played on this historic Hildebrandt organ. Here’s a brief YouTube video describing the making of this recording:
The excellent recording introduced in this short video (I have a copy of this SACD/CD which I highly recommend), gives us listeners the opportunity to hear how the well-recorded sound of a fine pipe organ can also be used to evaluate the quality of our audio systems.
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@hilde45
for me, it is a useful comparison in many respects
we are fortunate to have a lovely 1920’s bechstein grand in our living room - sometimes it is fun to hear it being played live, as a reference, then compare various aspects of its sound to what can be reproduced by the hi-fi (albeit in a different room)
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@serjio 've had my pianos voiced at some expenditure of time (and some money). They sounded fabulous for the moment, and maybe two weeks out before souring. Bernstein's guy told me to get rid of the old Bosendorfer and buy a Steinway.
You are right about EQ. It is frowned upon in high end circles, even the top end stuff (eg. Cello) is regarded as a curiosity, not a "solution."
I'm not sure I fully understood your discussion of manufacturer offered configuration variables, I think there are simply too many variables for a single manufacture to be responsible for some non-existent standard.
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Yes, when they sing those low notes, they run 3’ to the left….. , capturing the spatial cues while keeping EVRYTHing else in balance…is the difficult part….
carry on, i got a microphone preamp to tweak…..
Jim
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A. you - an ordinary person will not get anything at all - you need a professional piano tuner ...
B. since you practically do not have the ability to change the system (equalizers are rarely used by manufacturers - it is not profitable for manufacturers to give the layman a key with which most systems can be configured and DO NOT NEED TO BUY other amplifiers, players, speakers, wires) ... just listen to what you like best) ))
Brodman - plays the piano perfectly ... but it's expensive and usually plays other music in the middle ...
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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.
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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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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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as a sometimes recording engineer, i can assure you the piano is a beast to capture…a 2-3 microphone compromise….. the piano does not move like a vocalist…can and do….but hey, that’s part of the fun…
enjoy the illusion, just get a dose of the real thing..now….then…
Jim
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To test subtle transients and details... I use this ...
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On this topic, any good piano songs that I can add to my speaker evaluation playlist?
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Great post that say it all simply and better than me... Thanks...
About 50 years ago Bud Fried(Irving M Fried of IMF speakers) told me he thought the 3 hardest things to reproduce in order are male voice(we are so familiar with it and it goes into an upper bass region speakers often suck on), female voice(again we’re so familiar with it) and piano because it has such a huge dynamic ranger which is often very short duration demanding linear level changes that stop and start very quickly stressing a system and especially speakers hugely.
Bud used the term dynamic linearity. He didn’t just mean the ability to play clean and loud. He meant the ability to accurately follow all level changes, small to medium to large. I find this to often be the achilles heel of systems that otherwise sound clean and tonally accurate, the difference between a wonderful wide band radio and something that at times lets you make believe it’s real. My main source for this is a Kissin piano ’Pictures At An Exhibition,.
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About 50 years ago Bud Fried(Irving M Fried of IMF speakers) told me he thought the 3 hardest things to reproduce in order are male voice(we are so familiar with it and it goes into an upper bass region speakers often suck on), female voice(again we're so familiar with it) and piano because it has such a huge dynamic ranger which is often very short duration demanding linear level changes that stop and start very quickly stressing a system and especially speakers hugely.
Bud used the term dynamic linearity. He didn't just mean the ability to play clean and loud. He meant the ability to accurately follow all level changes, small to medium to large. I find this to often be the achilles heel of systems that otherwise sound clean and tonally accurate, the difference between a wonderful wide band radio and something that at times lets you make believe it's real. My main source for this is a Kissin piano 'Pictures At An Exhibition,.
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- higher and lower scale in frequency range than any other instrument.
Perhaps right after the organ. Bagend makes an Infrasub organ loudspeaker for 8 hz and small pipes can go beyond hearing.
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But getting a chorus right with all details is the END goal...Single voice, piano and separate instruments timbre and even orchestra are STEPS in the tuning process... Chorus are very difficult to be done right because the voices timbre could be huge in number and near one another like cello and violins are...
Here you must perceive and distinguish 8 voices....2 females and 6 males...
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You must be able to recognize these three very different timbre:
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Very true...
I used Moravec nocturnes Chopin or Feltsman Bach Well tempered Klavier....Only these 2...They are very different but good in their own way...The Moravec recording though is unsurpassed both musically and sonically...But the dynamic of the Feltsman recording is sometimes stunning for bass notes tuning ...
In an incremental process of tuning the room for months you must know the recording very well and it must be a good one....
IMO, the problem with using a piano as a reference (generally) is that there are so many poorly recorded piano pieces. The piano must/has to be the hardest instrument to get recorded correctly to fully reproduce its the broad and nuanced (detail) sound capabilities, much more apparent live.
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IMO, the problem with using a piano as a reference (generally) is that there are so many poorly recorded piano pieces. The piano must/has to be the hardest instrument to get recorded correctly to fully reproduce its the broad and nuanced (detail) sound capabilities, much more apparent live.
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You cannot have a piano right and violin wrong AT THE END...
You cannot have all these two right and voice wrong AT THE END of the process...
First voice... Because we are inwardly tuned to recognize voices...
Then piano...Because of the huge dynamical field covered by this instrument...
Then violins and brass and wood...Or orchestra... Because the great number of this different timbre playing together distinctly is great test to end...
There is an order for me because i use that to test my room for the tuning for months...
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Agree on massed strings being an ultimate hifi litmus test.
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@hilde45, I use the ECM Schiff Beethoven recordings. They are good recordings. Schiff used a Bosendorfer for some and a Steinway for others. I think I can tell which piano he used on my system. I took one of those recordings to an audition, and the speaker failed miserably to get the tonality right, though it sounded pretty good on orchestral works. None of us were in the mixing room for a recording, so it is always a guess. Assuming the recording engineer knew what he was doing, we make a judgement on what sounds "right."
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@brownsfan @lalitk and others -- this is great! Thanks so much. I really do find it helpful in addition (of course) to the human voice. There's no either/or in any of this.
What is hard with pianos is that not having heard the piano in the recording there is a huge "guess factor" as to whether component/speaker A or B is getting "closer" to the original. One thing I heard today, though, which is not compromised by that problem was a piano with high notes that sounded like a toy piano. That clearly is a speaker not dealing well with tonality/overtones.
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Really important for detecting crossover anomalies, dynamics, and tone.
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The most important thing about piano is already said here:
So what does piano reveals exceptionally well to my ears?
- musical scale, unlike any other instruments offering an incredible, unparalleled range.
- higher and lower scale in frequency range than any other instrument.
- both treble and bass clef while most other instruments reveals only one or the other.
But i used the human voice first before piano.... Chorus or single voice... Because evolution trained us one million year to recognize a voice anywhere in any location at the risk of death...
After that i use piano also....
Third i used brass and violins...
but never mind the instruments, each playing note must be SEEN to be a dynamical flowing volume in the room with a micro-structure like a skin with his own texture...
«Sound smell»-anonymus acoustician
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I also listen to the hammer strike, the initial overtones, and their decay. Instructive in terms of how the system handles the whole sonic envelope, not just wide frequency range. I’ve had a couple very good pianos, including a vintage Bosendorfer. You can make easy comparisons by ear with the live instrument and a recording. (Every piano, even the same brand/model, tends to sound different. Someone who restores these instruments knows how to voice them to achieve different tone and attack).
The trick is finding good recordings. Either the piano is too closely mic’d or is presented in miniature compared to a full sized grand.
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@hilde45 I have found that solo piano recordings that I know well will reveal speaker aberrations pretty quickly. I also use solo voice, hopefully, SATB, because I want nothing to do with a speaker that does not do voice right. Not sure why, but I've also found that good recordings of french horns can reveal aberrations that might otherwise go unnoticed. If speakers pass these tests, then I go on to other speaker attributes. I assume you are doing your evaluations at home in your own system with your own music. Now that you are adept at optimizing speaker/room interactions, you are in a really good place to find a speaker that is going to do well for you.
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@hilde45
Maybe because pianos are the foundation of musical instruments in general. The rich tonality of the piano evokes incomparable pleasure for both musicians and listener alike. So what does piano reveals exceptionally well to my ears?
- musical scale, unlike any other instruments offering an incredible, unparalleled range.
- higher and lower scale in frequency range than any other instrument.
- both treble and bass clef while most other instruments reveals only one or the other.
Good luck and hope you find your forever speakers, I know I have :-)
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I've owned and played my share of pianos over the years, but I also play the fiddle and I have to say that massed strings is the true litmus test for determining the ultimate veracity of a system. And when you're judging a system by a piano recording, don't get too crazy! Many fine pianos sport a fuzzy tone in the midrange upwards, so you got to take what can sound like a mistracking cartridge or a gently clipping amplifier section in stride. And of course, as mentioned above, reproduction of the human voice shouldn't be given short shrift, either. I mean, how often do we hear a live, un-amplified human voice? A zillion times a day? True, it's not often enough that a vocal is recorded with true, convincing accuracy, but believable vocal rendition is still a worthy audio goal. In any event, true, dynamic range is important but I'll take a slight dynamic hit every time to preserve tonal quality and lack of distortion.
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reproducing piano is the toughest test for any music equipment.
it has to sound clean throughout all dynamic passages and throughout the entire keyboard.
why it's the toughest test, because piano has all instruments combined. when you hit the string, you literally play drum and note together.
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The sound of a piano seems to be one of the easiest instruments to recall.
In playback it also seems to be one of the easiest ones to detect any sonic issues.
As said earlier, it’s an issue of power, weight, and scale.
Perhaps tone and reverb too as no two ever seem to sound the same, and you don’t need to be Glenn Gould to feel that way.
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Acoustic instruments go a long way in the realm of realism when a system is firing on all cylinders. If the initial movement (of a key, valve, etc.) is captured, followed by the strike of it, followed by the burst and then bloom, and then the associated spread, decay and reverb, the whole soundstage develops to a degree that can make one momentarily forget they're listening to a recording. A piano is a great instrument that can do that.
One can faithfully replicate the passing of a heavily laden semi without all the shaking when a piano plumbs its depths. A microphone placed close to the soundboard can be all it takes to make you forget and just revel in it all.
If your system can already capture and recreate that kind of moment, then you're almost there.
All the best,
Nonoise
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Good points and very helpful. I went out of my way *not* to ask if it should be the only one. I'm really drilling here for phenomenological details, i.e., descriptions of what one notices in a piano recording that has probative value for a more general conclusion about the capabilities of the system. There is some of that in this post by McGowan.
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It's the most difficult instrument to capture.
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Power, weight, and scale.
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Well-recorded piano can show a lot about a system. Assuming it was well-recorded. It covers virtually the entire musical pitch spectrum and has a huge amount of weight when captured accurately, not to mention the inner detail of the hammers striking the strings, the sounds of the pedals and the bench creaking, which it often does. So, assuming you know what to listen for, piano can be an excellent tool in selecting a speaker. But it is one of many tools. If I were forced to pick only one, I personally would choose the human voice.
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Piano is probably the single best instrument to use as a reference in that it can deliver good dynamics across a wide range of frequencies, but unless one was highly biased towards listening exclusively to piano music (what??) I would not rely exclusively on it. But include it for tests, yes. Piano recordings vary widely in nature of the sound so find good ones to use if desired.
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@testpilot @chayro Thanks. Piano is important to me, too, so I'd listen for that reason.
I do sometimes listen to music which is not the genre of what I usually listen to, but which nevertheless demonstrates something valuable about the system's abilities which would still be a benefit to me for the listen I do prefer. E.g. Argentinian folk music is not necessarily my thing, but I love American and English folk music. So, clear crossover value of hearing a good Argentinian folk recording as a test.
That's a long-winded way of asking (as I did meant to in my OP) whether the "piano test" has a value which goes beyond the subset of music lovers who like piano.
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Not to be facetious - I think solo piano is an important instrument to evaluate equipment with if you like to listen to a lot of solo piano. I would venture a guess that the majority of audiophiles cannot, either by budget or space constraints, own no-compromise speakers that excel on all genres of music. Assuming such a thing exists. So most of us make some compromises and IMO, that's best done by choosing speakers that make the music you value sound good to your ears. I'm not saying "accurate" or "true to the recording" because, unless we produced the recording, we can never know what that is. So I'm just saying it has to sound good to us. So for me, piano is important. BTW - If you want some nice piano music, try Bach on a Steinway and Dr. John Plays Mac Rebennack. Both excellent solo piano recordings, IMO>
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IME, very important when evaluating a turntable.
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