Speakers that do pianos really well


I recently had the good fortune to listen to a half a dozen pretty well-regarded speakers back-to-back. For these kind of sessions I like using piano recordings - either solo or jazz trio - as a measure because, to my ear at least, it seems that speakers that can reproduce piano really well seem to be pretty well sorted on everything else. The surprising thing was how many of these speakers did NOT do piano well. Of the group there were only two - Vandersteen and Verity - that I thought really captured the big chords, shadings, timbres, and reverberations cleanly and naturally. The rest - and I'm not going to call them out by name - offered a mixed bag of over-brightness, distortion, and general unnaturalness. I was very surprised by the results as I expected better from some of these speakers based on their reviews and reputations. So my question is, Does anyone else use the piano as a litmus test, and what speakers do people use that they think do pianos really well? Regards.
grimace

Showing 1 response by br3098

IMO, no speaker can actually reproduce the tonal range and timbre of an acoustic piano realistically, but some I have heard have come closer than most.

To my ears, the old Apogee Full Range Planar was the best at reproducing piano, other EL/planar speakers such as the Maggie MG-1 and SoundLab are also very good, for a couple of reasons: I believe that not only does the nature of the planar transducer more accurately represent the effect of piano strings and a soundboard, but the dipole design produces a similar reflective environment.

I find the Quad designs pretty good at piano reproduction, but their limited panel size makes them less accurate for piano than the aforementioned larger speakers.

One non-planar speaker that impresses me with it's ability to reproduce piano and other tones with little coloration os the Earo Eight; an active, rear-loaded horn design that I find sounds remarkably similar to a planar speaker (but is much more room tolerant and wife friendly).