Nathanael_I

Wow, that's quite a fluid bench! It looks like it takes a moment to get used to, but it does solve a real problem of moving one's body to keep hands in correct position at the extremity of the instrument!

Then there’s genres that one piece of hardware really can’t deliver the sounds that are asked. Modern worship pretty much relies on laptop rigs to “sound like the record”. You’d need to sample extensively to load up a Kronos. Granular stuff. FX with fancy cascaded delay lines. stuff that’s easy in a computer. And the churches that play this music definitely have sound systems capable of reproducing nuance. The Romplers are focused on a particular swath of pop music. But there’s places those sounds aren’t that useful and computer rigs are the norm, not the exception. All the electronic musicians with an Ableton or looping core… I get the piano/EP/Organ in a box thing. Where that’s the core, totally makes sense. I’ve owned a Kronos twice and sampled hardware synths into it. But it’s way easier to use a laptop. (And I use Gig Performer vs MainStage now - much more intuitive and never had the CPU limitations MainStage did). on iPads, I do have a brand new M1 iPad. It’s great. Laptop fast. But the laptop is just way more together as a device, and hardly more weight. Current high end M1 Max with 64Gb RAM does anything asked on idle. Way better than the little CPU struggling inside a Kronos. I liked laptop rigs a decade ago, and still do. Strangely, I do like the new Nord Stage4 - it sounds great, and is clearly easy to adjust on the fly. The laptop rigs don’t come that way - it’s work to make them so.

It’s much simpler than that and has nothing to do with house prices. Demand for new acoustic pianos has dropped continuously every year for a long time. Only 6,000 new grands were purchased in 2020 in the US. A hundred years ago it was over 150,000! (And we had way less population) Fifteen years ago I realized that anyone asking me what piano to get for their kid was NOT asking about an acoustic instrument. I know keyboard-oriented musicians that have never owned an acoustic piano. They studied on digitals and that’s what they own and play. there’s a glut of used ones because they last a very long time and there are many more of them than people want. But they are instruments, and so have a strange mystique, and people need “them to go to a good home”. Here in the Bay Area, real estate probably hinders more acoustic piano purchases than anything. Though if you are a homeowner, the equity could likely make a nice instrument a reality.

You can get baby grands in great shape for $2500 to $3500 any day here in the Bay Area. It’s a buyers market. Used acoustic pianos are shockingly cheap. If you can afford a Kronos, you can afford a piano. Not new, but that’s not important. Many are hardly played.

There won't be ChatGPT without a major architectural and cost overhaul. AI uses graphics cards to scale. The very latest and best desktop CPUs have small AI accelerators on them to help. You want a beefy graphics card if you run ChatGPT locally. To access it in the cloud, you need a network stack and internet. How to get that? The phone in your pocket. But is a major manufacturer of traditionally stand-alone devices going to make a keyboard that depends on a cell-phone with internet access for a main feature? It's probably technically completely realistic and reasonable. But many who buy these kinds of keyboards here are buying them so they DON'T deal with computers or internet. Those of us on laptop rigs would shrug anyway and keep using better synths, samples, etc than they'll ever put in a board meant to appeal to people who used a Motif 20 years ago. The reuse of very marginal samples is great for the bean counters, but for sound quality, I don't get it. As for sequencers, why use an onboard one when Ablelton exists or the Elektron boxes? This is what new music is doing. Even with the miss on multi-timbral control, I think Yamaha was right to ditch the sequencer. The performance keyboards (Nord, Yamaha) that focus on keys sounds natively, but then have easy computer connection are just winners. The two things I need in a physical device are feel and real-time control. Editing/tweaking/programming is all better on a computer with a nice screen. I thought the Montage was amazing when released. I loved the FM synth integration as an idea for fresh sounds. The SuperKnob was very well thought out. Macro controls are where it's at - the C15 from Non-Linear Labs sorted this even better. But, I watched some videos and knew I'd never buy it. That kind of UI on a little crappy screen just held no interest. It's all the complexity of a computer rig, but with few of the benefits. I'm very tech savvy, but was just not interested in sorting out the zillions of layers, routing, control, etc. inside it's shell. The early multi-timbral control issues completely killed it for me, though they were fixed eventually.

I think it's a big miss to have membrane sensors and not optical sensors with Hi-def MIDI (14-bit output). I have a Non-linear Labs C15 that scans the keys 4000 times a second for internal sounds. It is a radically more connected experience than MIDI. The VAX77 playing Pianoteq was the same (14 bit MIDI). Making a deluxe case is cool, and the feel is critical. But the sensors are what make a controller expressive! I already have a Nord Grand with a lovely triple-sensor action. I like the idea of this a lot. But it is not an insta-buy. All of my DM questions about the data stream have gone unanswered. I wanted to know how the dynamic range is - how controllable it is down into the MIDI 20s... how hard it is to get 128.... what is the usable range. Note off velocity? There's just no detail on what the controller data stream includes, and that makes it difficult to evaluate except as a box of beautiful wood.

I got no answer to a question about its data stream. The most important quality in a controller is the output data. Love the nice case, but what about the sensors? Seems they use standard bubble contacts. No mention of triple sensor. No mention of 14-bit MIDI. It’s a nice case. But I want to know about its actual qualities as a controller. Can it play controllably in the 20s and below? What is its expressive range? The VAX 77 was delightful in these regards. The Kawai Grand is also quite good. How good is the data out of this?

BTW, Rod Gervais's book, "Build it Like the Pros" is worth 10x the purchase price. It is practical and implementable and covers everything you need to understand isolation and fix issues.

No, it will do almost nothing unless you have properly gasketed the door so there is zero air movement through it. Then the mass will help. Unfortunately, any air leakage between rooms will largely render extra mass useless.

Dave Smith has always struck me as a very rational, wise business man. He's done well, and probably sold at a great time for himself. Much of my audio world comes from the group Focusrite is a part of (Audiotonix). SSL, Focusrite, Sequential, Allen & Heath, Slate Digital. I want Klang IEM systems... Basically, it's a collection of many of my core vendors, all of whom are doing solid work. I had zero concerns about Sequential joining that brand family. Some of the best companies out there are part of the group.

If the company was thriving, it would not be shedding key employees or being sold to a musical brand holding company. InMusic does not want to kill it. They have no motivation to do so. They also have to attempt to fix whatever is wrong. What is wrong may include things many customers love but represent unsustainable practices around products, marketing, branding, expenses, expansion rate, profit re-investment, etc. They will likley even know that some of these changes will be unpopular, but they will have to do them. The company has to work as a company. I do hope they figure it out. This is the truth that people in love with the brand and products find hard. They want no change. But it's change or die, in this case. I have a Model D from the first batch. It's a wonderful instrument. It does one thing, but oh so well. It's worth more than I paid for it now, which will likely remain true for its life. I passed on the One. I already have a Bowen Solaris that does most of that ground at about half the price. For that $$, I'd go digital and the Waldorf Quantum II - it's way more flexible sonically. I passed on all the DFAM style mini-modular things... I have a full modular. The endless parade of monosynths is cool, but I haven't bought one. I think as long as you have one, a stack of guitar pedals or an Eventide Max does the rest. I think some non-players buy them and plug them into their modulars. But that's not what I do. A polysynth like the Dave Smith instruments is way more practical for playing out. And monosynths from Arturia and Sequential have way more features and go more places than the Moog stuff. I don't know how others think about their product line, but not a lot interests me enough to spend money. Moog owns a certain historic sound/approach. But the innovation is not in that sound. It's in newer digital techniques. Poly-AT surfaces. Without innovative takes on wave folding, FM, ring modulation and other techniques to add complexity at the oscillator level, standard subtractive is pretty basic and picked over at this point. The old MoogerFooger pedals were pretty cool, but I didn't get in on them while they were still being made. I think they ended up being too costly to produce as things went surface mount. Manufacturing hardware is hard, and mistakes are very costly. Look at AVID - also up for sale because of HW-related issues.

I suspect you are right. Especially if you also posit the kind of stereo systems average people could own in the 70s. Everything distorted the sound, shaved transients or otherwise dulled the signal. Toss in a few Baxendall style "tone" controls with coarse effects, and RIAA filters that might not be perfectly implemented and there would be warmth (distortion) everywhere for the average person. Transducers (speakers) have come a huge way, along with cabinet design since then. And here too, DSP and digital correction has created much better crossovers for many applications than analog parts can make. In my studio, sound hits microphones, which go directly to the preamps and converters in the AVID MTRX. So digitization is almost immediate. Signals stay digital until inside my Genelec monitors. The audio quality, imaging, etc is exceptional. I am very, very happy with modern high-end digital recording and signal processing. I released the dream of a large analog console years ago, despite growing up drooling on the Mix magazine covers of the mid-nineties.

It's actually based on math done about 100 years ago by Nyquist and Shannon. Brilliant men. A shocking amount of our modern world would be impossible without their theorems. They underpin information theory, signal processing, and much more. Truly genius-level stuff. They showed that if you have samples at twice the rate of the input signal, only one curve will correctly connect them - and that curve is the exact same as the input signal. This is mathematically and practically provable. Every frequency within the band-limited signal will be reproduced exactly. The "niggle" with respect to audio is that this is true for a fixed bandwidth only. How large should that bandwidth be? Que the sample rate wars and how high humans can hear. (We can't hear above 20khz... there's no hardware for it - one can posit magic, but there's no hardware for it in the ear). Because of aliasing, some plugins DO sound better below 20Khz if operated at 96Khz or higher. But humans still can't hear up above 20kHz - most of us not close to that. The other niggle is that when you filter bandwidth sharply, the filters can ring, alias, and cause other problems that ripple down into audible territory. This was common 30-40 years ago in early digital systems. It has not been a problem in professional audio equipment for well over a decade, if not two. Higher bandwidth (higher sample rate) means that the filters and artifacts of sampling are WAY out of audible range. In properly designed digital gear, any digital anomalies are below -110dbFS even at standard sampling rates of 44.1/48Khz. Digital anomalies are inaudible unless you have your volume maxed in a near-silent moment. Digital is fabulously better than any comparable analog system where noise and distortions of any kind are concerned. The finest analog systems often operated with 40-60dB worse noise performance. The distortions in digital: quantization noise, dither noise, over-modulation, aliasing, etc. are real. Digital distortion is totally different than analog distortion (hiss, wow, flutter, saturation, harmonic distortion). Digital is very unforgiving at its limits. Within them, it is near perfect. Analog often gives lots of 2nd harmonic distortion at its limits, which many find pleasant. None of the above creates aesthetic law. People can like whatever they like for whatever reason. But the technical performance of modern digital systems vastly exceeds the finest analog recording technologies of days gone by. There's a reason essentially all classical and fine art recording went digital around the year 2000. The people who most valued transparency and accuracy in the recording medium itself did the tests and never looked back.

Many people use it, typically as part of a wall construction, but I don't think usually by itself. It would work by itself if you seal all the seams and make it airtight top and bottom. The air-tight bit is why it is usually part of a wall assembly with drywall that has been caulked top and bottom with backer rod. It's easier to caulk the drywall than seal the MLV. Rod Gervais's book is useful for this. MLV is very effective. And very heavy to work with.

This is just not true. The marketing diagrams lie. There is no "train of square waves". The reconstruction filters produce exactly the same analog wave that went in the other side. Many people believe the square wave trope. But it isn't true, at least the part that digital = square waves. The bit about harmonics is true, but that isn't how digital reproduction works.

Yes, the price of GDPR fines is a percentage of revenue.... You make 100B a year, great, break the law and it will cost you billions...

I was a bit lost on trying to turn this into a profitable business, but a simple Patreon ask is easy. Done. I've learned so much here - even found the piano in my studio through Dave Ferris. I don't drink coffee, but I can buy the site one every month!

I suspect they need capital to restructure hardware contracts that have become uneconomic with supply chain, China tension, etc. A big part of AVID's business is stable and diversified into many professional sectors. Hobbyists don't see it. But big portions of video and audio post-production run on Avid tooling. Their numbers for subscription revenue have been going up. The public markets are hard right now, so selling is one way to raise the needed capital. My HDX + MTRX is the best recording system I've ever owned. I'm very happy with it. Zero latency, stellar sonics, seamless "hybrid" mode operation. They are not cheap friends to have. But they also deliver things for audio editing that no one else even attempts. The group that owns SSL & Allen & Heath might be interesting. They have built a very nice business. Owning Avid would take them to the next level as a player in the music manufacturing space and there are hardware synergies to drive in parts ordering. They are a logical buyer.

It will happen. I've actually been surprised that the industry didn't move to 32 bit audio sooner. Not because it sounds better, but because it's the data block that CPU's use. I do understand that the floating-point math in any DAW is immediately not 24 bits (commonly 32 or 64 bit). I believe that the ProTools mixbus has been 64-Bit for a while. It just makes sense. If you have 64 bit hardware, you can get more work done every cycle if you feed it that way. It is already the case that if a developer can use Intel's AVX extensions, they can get 512 bits or more processed in one clock cycle. It's very impressive how much work can be done with optimized code and AVX-capable CPUs. Audio is small work compared to video and AI workloads, so it will continue to "ride for free" and likely just adapt to whatever the compute industry needs for efficiency. The best-performing audio software comes from the few companies that have made their own real-time OS: Merging's Pyramix, SSL's T and L series consoles. They are able to run massive track counts without any DSP and have fully time-aligned, latency-free performance out of relatively modest CPU's. It's getting rid of a non-real-time OS and all its distractions that helps the most.

The only way I've gotten somewhat around this is to get the SKB laptop over 4RU case. The MBP lives on the top. The USB connection goes through a passthrough to a USB hub mounted securely on a rack shelf so it can't move at all. The RME UCX interface is mounted on its rack ears, and connects to the hub with cables that are zip-tied in place. The laptop is held gently in place by velcro brackets. It's not immune from a complete upset, but it won't move in use or if the case is bumped. So the USB is as stable as a desktop situation. Not perfect, but at least self-contained. There's XLR or 1/4" on the UCX and then I'm to normal audio connectors. With the rack either on a small stand or the ground, if I don't need to see the screen, it's secure enough. I'd love locking connectors, but then you have the problem that Mag-Safe power connectors solve - trip over a cable and yank a $4k laptop onto the floor. The truth is that modern stage and studio audio is so amazing, and so fragile all at once. It's a wonder anything works at all. I've had miles of copper wire on the ground and somehow it all works.

I lost a knob on my Push2, and they just sent it to me in the mail. Super easy and very helpful.

That’s what I love about this pair of recordings - the difference is quite audible. There is an added clarity on the straight strung instruments, and the harmonics sustain differently. I suspect it would serve early music up through Mozart well, much like a Steingraeber & Sohne. Magical “classical” sound. For bigger, louder or darker work, I do prefer cross-stringing, which I suppose is obvious from my choice. But what a world we live in that these options are available and even documented on Spotify! I’m glad you took the time to listen critically, because it’s not subtle and one could easily choose differently than I have. Fazioli also has a thinner sound that is so intoxicating to play, but I don’t prefer it on recordings generally. I’ve long suspected that Fazioli’s outstanding action prep has much to do with player perception of expressiveness, and the clarity is welcome on lower register voicings for sure. It is very hard to beat the drama of a fine Steinway for recording dramatic music. The timbral complexity is interesting when the visual element is removed. Many of the European pianos are more even top to bottom, but they just don’t have that over-the-top drama thing going on. I chose the path of greater complexity on the bright side, but also softer with the half blow. For me, a best-of-both worlds, but as I said at the outset, I’ve plenty of room for others to find their joy elsewhere. piano tone is every bit as much a choice one can make as guitar tone…

I think you are missing something in your analysis. Much of the best visual storytelling today is NOT being done for theaters. They are dying a slow death since COVID and the rise of truly great streaming shows. Who wants to sit in a shabby seat with sticky floors and 30 minutes of truly mind-numbing previews for movies I'll never want to watch? The best writers and directors are not making Marvel movies. They are working on Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming productions. People aren't talking about movies in the hallways at work. They talk about shows. All of these are done to very high production standards - theater quality. Read the Netflix video and audio standards if you don't believe me. They describe in detail the entire post-production chain that must be intact in order to pay for the show. It's as pro as pro gets. No different than a Hollywood structure. These shows have budgets in the tens and hundreds of millions - just like a movie. Game of Thrones is a streaming franchise worth billions of dollars. Video games are 9 times larger by revenue than the entire movie industry, and the blockbusters have the same budgets as the largest motion pictures. The theaters are almost not relevant to the cultural conversation in 2023. The actual innovation in storytelling is happening on streaming. What director would want to tell a short 90 min story vs. having a whole season to develop a narrative arc? The medium is just vastly superior for storytelling. And the innovation is happening much faster than the theatrical system can sustain. The day of a handful of taste masters deciding what everyone should watch and listen to is over. It's been over in music for almost two decades, and it's now that way for film and storytelling. The explosion of creativity we are witnessing is fantastic. It is an amazing time to be a creative with access to world-class tools at affordable prices and almost free global distribution.

Pretty much everything musical that I now own. I wasn’t blessed with childhood music lessons. I saw my first synths: SY77, Ensoniq, Korg M1 as I was leaving for college. Instant desire and machined from pure unobtainium. When I joined the military I saved every penny for months and ordered a 61-note Korg 01/Wfd. I didn’t know about NAMM and two weeks later the Triton came out. I used that O1/W for years. I learned a lot on it. My grandfather gave me my first piano; a Hamilton (Baldwin) baby grand. I later paid for it to be fully rebuilt. Now 25 years later, I have a dream studio. Filled with sonic excellence and rare and special things from around the world. It was all dreamed about for years, assembled slowly over time. The Stuart and Sons concert grand piano I’m waiting for started as a dream over a decade ago - think 13 years ago, and it was the best recorded piano sound I’d ever heard. Again, pure unobtanium at the time and until just a year ago. so I don’t really have any other story than long held desire, hard work, and much later, acquisition. I wouldn’t have even known this stuff existed at twenty, much less what to do with it - which I tell to the young musicians who walk in and are blown away. I tell them, they don’t need any of this. They get it. It’s a blessing, yes. It’s also a season of life thing… some things take some life and financial maturity to go along with the dream.

Interesting. Had not heard of it. I sold the Roli on a few years ago. I just couldn’t get on with the key waves. With the Osmose now here, I have the expressive keyboard that works with standard keyboard technique. Somewhere I decided that it’s a lifetime to explore the black and white key pattern given by the piano, organs, etc. So, I’ve passed on the Continuum as well. Brilliant and so expressive. I just don’t wish to spend the time it takes to learn it well.