Why not the piano as a reference for bass
I see a lot of commentary/reviews on a systems bass response that all seem to hinge on the 41 hz double bass and such range. At 27.5 the A0 note on a piano seems a better point to judge. Lots of piano in normal music vs say an organ note. I know when I feel that deep chord played it is one of things I enjoy about listening the most! Was listening to Wish you were here live and the piano was sublime.
So is it more of how much musical energy is perceived in the 40 hz range or what that makes this more of a reproduction benchmark?
I welcome your input!
New Joe Bonamassa out BTW!
If we are talking double bass, in most classical music it is mainly bowed and in a big orchestral piece there might be eight or so playing in unison. There is no other sound like that with as much character! |
Thanks for the clarification! I don’t agree that the low notes on a modern grand piano (piano-forte or soft-loud) contain so little energy that they do not merit being reproduced. Bosendorfer and Stuart keep extending the keyboard downwards! I don’t think Beethoven would have agreed either - he was very quick to extend the range he wrote for when gifted pianos which went further up and down! There is of course a fundamental difficulty in judging sound quality against amplified sources - there is no original to compare to. Anyway, I use soft piano music to judge atmospherics and double bass for bass impact ... but the main thing is to enjoy your music |
Yep, that bass is a plucked double bass but on the released track it was 'doubled' by a bass electric guitar, according to the clip. My point was that there is much more you can do with a double bass than just pluck it. With classical music you can go to concerts which are not subject to electronic manipulation so there is a real reference for judging reproduced sound quality. A bowed double bass will make all your drivers work hard, including the tweeters! |
No doubt the electric piano was attempting to sound like a real piano? When I play the lowest note on an acoustic piano, the amount of sound energy output is pretty directly related to how quickly I press the key. There is no artificial limit, and no shortage of sound either. The key mechanism is mechanical, not some electronic switch or sensor. And the whole piano resonates |
One of the interesting things about the piano is that the pianist’s ’touch’ does not alter the harmonics present in the note being struck. The best example I can give of this is the astonishing recording of Grieg’s Piano Concerto released in multiple surround sound formats by the Norwegian label 2L.no - see GRIEG Piano Concerto - Percy Grainger, Kristiansand Symfoniorkester, R – 2L Music Store Originally recorded on piano rolls in 1921, the new recording has a full symphony orchestra and a modern Steinway piano, played mechanically! This is one of those unusual recordings where both the performance and the sound quality are superb. Percy Grainger was a very interesting character, being Australian, a pianist, a composer, an athlete and a sadomasochist. His ideal instruments would have been synthesizers, but they were yet to be invented. I can’t let this go without mentioning the Australian designed and built Stuart and Sons’ Concert Grand Pianos, some of which extend the ’standard’ 88 note keyboard to 108 keys with the lowest note a subsonic 16-Hz |
@audiokinesis From the comments, the guy who posted that video had no idea what microphone was used, let alone what piano or where the microphone was positioned! What I do find interesting is the low modes that are excited when high pitch notes are played. As I wrote above, the whole piano resonates - after all, it is filled with more than 88 tuned resonators and felt can only damp so much. Sure the low notes also carry a lot of harmonics, which is why the piano sounds like a piano and not like a pure pipe organ. Agreed, many people may not hear the fundamentals of low notes, and few indeed will directly hear the 16-Hz fundamental of a 108-key Stuart piano's lowest note. Few subwoofers will even go close with any sort of accuracy. Same goes for the 8-Hz fundamental of Sydney Town Hall's organ with its 64 foot long Gravissima pipe. You can't hear it but you can certainly feel it! |
Alas no! I am slightly friendly with several organists in Sydney but none has hinted when that 64 foot monster might be exercised. Mostly I hear church and cathedral organs, and the refurbished beast in the Sydney Opera House. Olivier Latry, the organist from Notre Dame in Paris, featured in Saint-Saens Organ Symphony and Poulenc's Concerto for Organ, Strings and Timpani - one of my personal favourites. The next day we went to his organ masterclass at the Opera House. It is amazing how each student had a USB stick with their personal settings for the organ configuration. I'd like to build a relational database representing that organ and its multiplicity of parts. I have heard a piano recital given on a Sturt and Sons concert grand piano, but not the full 108-key model. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation released video and CDs of Beethoven's Piano Concertos played on a Stuart piano. |
I want to try to nip this idea off, here and now! Just try this little experiment. Find yourself a mechanical (not electronic) piano and play the lowest key. You will hear the fundamental note, plus overtones. To discover what the first overtone sounds like, move up one octave and play that key. If the two notes sound as if they are the same frequency, then you cannot hear the lowest fundamental. But my experience on a Kawai upright piano is exactly the opposite, the lowest note is clearly an octave lower and is clearly audible. Just in case somebody suggests that the fundamental one octave up is also inaudible, hop another octave up and repeat. They cannot all be inaudible! Why an octave? An octave is just double the frequency and in Western music there are eight white piano keys spanning an octave (which is why the Latin for eight features in its name). There are seven white keys and five black keys before each octave pattern repeats - 12 notes in all. When Pete Townshend said he chose his double bass for the session, he doubled his pay by doubling this on an electric bass guitar 12 notes higher. Had me a bit confused but he was just playing one octave up, something very common in orchestral pieces where cellos double the basses, the picolo doubles the flute and so on. The physics of the fundamental vibration of a string are well known. The vibration frequency depends on the length of the string, the mass of the string and the tension in it. The fundamental frequency is where the entire string between its fixed ends moves in the same direction. But there is another mode, where the middle of the string remains stationary, and the two halves move in opposite directions. This is the first harmonic, and it is an octave up from the fundamental. And there are even more vibration modes, where there are four, five, six and so on stationary points in the string. By and large these modes do not sound pleasing. One more thing. A string can also vibrate along its length, and that vibration can be picked up. Usually the sound is horrible, like a violinist’s finger sliding on the string. When bowing, it is important that the bow remains at right angles to the string to avoid longitudinal resonances. It is said that violinists take about five years to learn how to use the left hand to get the right notes. The next five years is learning how to bow properly. So can piano be a useful guide to loudspeaker bass reproduction? Absolutely. I will take four speakers I am familiar with as examples. The first is the market-leading bookshelf speaker from KEF – the LS50. Its bass output has a 3-db roll-off at 79-Hz, which is well over an octave above the 31.5-Hz fundamental of a standard piano’s lowest note. You won’t get much of its first harmonic either! Staying with KEF but spending maybe eight times as much, we get the slightly bigger bookshelf KEF Reference 1. Its 3-db bass rolloff is at 45-Hz so you will not get much of the fundamental but the first harmonic should be all there. My third speaker is a full-range electrostatic from Quad – the ESL-2905. I cannot find its 3db rolloff but it is flat to 45-Hz and 6db down at 31-Hz. No real need for a subwoofer here. Finally to a subwoofer – the 18” servo controlled Velodyne DD-18. This has a 3db rolloff at 14.1-Hz, more than an octave below that fundamental. Good for a Bosendorfer or Stuart concert grand. The Velodyne fleshes out the Reference 1 beautifully, and takes a bit of the bass load off the Quad, which otherwise has little need of a sub. |
I went to a violin / piano recital at the Sydney City recital hall last week, where in the 20 minute interval, a piano tuner came on stage to work on the concert grand piano in full view of those who did not need a beer or a bubbly! That’s pressure ... It would be interesting to learn if Yamaha bothers to synthesize the fundamentals for the lowest notes, or just creates the harmonics. And to learn about the transducers (speakers) they use to produce the sound. These extra variables are why I suggested doing your own experiment on a genuine mechanical piano. It is no use listening to recordings through loudspeakers especially if the speakers are in your laptop. In my sleep last night, I thought of another reason why the piano is an excellent sound reference. It is because the sound produced from a single key depends only on how quickly the key is pressed, and the piano itself. The ’touch’ of the pianist is irrelevant because the hammer mechanism is decoupled from the key mechanism. That is unless the pianist reaches inside and manipulates the strings ... |
At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, electronic pianos contain sound systems, with all their faults and idiosyncrasies. At least some of Yamaha's Clavinova range contain cone drivers and use piano wood for the pulp
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Looking at Yamaha's website, it seems at least some Clavinova electronic pianos use actual recordings of single piano notes, played at varying intensities. The actual recordings are taken from a Bosendorfer and a Yamaha Concert Grand. During play, the notes are mixed and reverberations from the other strings are calculated, along with reverberations from the soundboard and the body of the piano. For headphone output, this is done in stereo. Yamaha has been a leader in digital signal processing with its AV Receivers, and its NS-5000 speaker family has been a classic for decades. Not to mention motorbikes and jet-skis |
You are well ahead of me, I can't even play the drums. But I did not make up the bit about Yamaha using sound recorded from a Bosendorfer Imperial! From Yamaha's Australian website: CLP-765GP - Features - Clavinova - Pianos - Musical Instruments - Products - Yamaha - Music - Australia
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I recently bought Hyperion’s CD (no SACD available) of Marc-Andre Hamelin playing the opus 106 Hammerklavier Sonata. According to the notes, during its composition Beethoven was given a Broadwood piano from London. Like Viennese pianos of the time, these had a six octave range, but started half an octave lower at CC compared to FF. The first two movements of the sonata use the higher range, the last two the lower one. So it would seem that Beethoven did indeed compose for a future instrument, since no single piano he was aware of could manage all the notes in the Hammerklavier Sonata. Similar thinking is behind the Stuart and Sons extended keyboard instruments, which have some other revolutionary features including a fourth pedal, which moves the hammer closer to the strings for really soft playing. The strings couple to the soundboard vertically rather than horizontally, and transmit more sound energy than conventional pianos. They are deliberately designed for a livelier sound than say Steinways or Bosendorfers. |
An infrasonic square wave, and in fact any square wave, theoretically contains every higher harmonic right up to infinity. As such every driver in a conventional dynamic speaker will contribute, and the tweeter in principle will be fed infinite power. Fortunately, the slew rate of any real-world amplifier is not infinitely fast. My favourite digital format, Direct Stream Digital, cannot even represent a square wave, any more than a vinyl groove can. I cannot think of any natural phenomenon that produces a true square wave. |
@timstella Even Yamaha only claims that their Clavinovas approach the sound quality of the best concert grand pianos.
On the other hand, they have all the benefits of digital including being affordable enough and small enough for home use |
