just one thing to say:

playing acoustic music on loudspeakers always means re-construction: soundwaves to electrical current in the mic, plus maybe digitalizing and decoding to analogue, then reconstructing the soundwaves my moving the loudspeaker membrane.

that´s the nature of it. you never listen to the original, but to an electro-acoustic (plus maybe digital) reconstruction of the original.

if that reconstruction sounds good, it´s good. if vsl data compression sounds good, it´s good.

but here is the solution: if vienna imperial does not sound "original" enough, we just have to buy a boesendorfer ceus imperial. 

i tested it, it´s really really marvellous. 130k and you´re done.

@clemenshaas said:

130k and you´re done.

Jeez..it was a mere 15k last night Clemens. For 130 I'd be hoping for Julian's 10,000 brick apartment to be part of the deal. [:D]

Colin

@julian said:

Computers do not have a subjective button. There would be absolutely no file saving by zipping 100 performances of the same piece by different pianists! compared with 100 totally different pieces. CM will, I'm sure, confirm this!

 

Here's an analogy: You want to build a house from handmade bricks. It takes 10,000 bricks to build the house but you don't want to transport 10,000 bricks so you transport 1000 bricks and make 9,000 machine reconstructed bricks based on the 1000 originals. The house created from the machine bricks may look the same (for 99% of viewers) as the house built completely from totally handmade bricks BUT for the purist the machine reconstructed brick house is not original handmade materials.

 not everything that is flawed is a comparision ... christian

@mdovey said:

A good benchmark if VSL is willing to try it, would be for someone in VSL to take the full 500GB uncompressed data and put it in a big zip file, and then let us know what compression that achieves. It may not be as good as the 10:1 ratio (and a bit embarrasing for VSL it it turns out better!!), but my suspicion is that it will not be too far off (8:1 - 9:1).

as an average value - C4 vel 64 1s:zip: 92% rar 71% ... not too embarrassing 😉 christian

@Football said:

Good Lord, this thread is nuts.  Very much looking forward to more demos.

Nuts are of little use without a thread, therefore a thread is of little use without a nut.

Discuss

Sorry to be a butt here and point this out, but if a piano has 88 keys and there are 1200 samples per key; then why are there only 69,633 samples?  88 keys x 1200 samples per key = 105,600 samples.  I apologize if this question has already been asked and answered, I did a search for it and didn't find anything.

By the way, Jay's demo sounds absolutely incredible, by far the most fantastic sampled piano in the universe....that is until VSL creates the next one! [:)]

@Aldo Esplay said:

I have to agree with you Julian in the sense that if you simply overlaid two samples, even if the velocity was identical and phases were aligned as much as possible at the beginning of the sample, that by the end the two would be out of phase. However, mdovey's approach would need little modification to do a pretty good job. With Christian's test with zipping one of the files, I doubt anything this cumbersome is needed, but here's the idea. Most of the energy of the string is at some fundamental frequency. Since a good number of the keys in the piano have three strings, technically you'd have to determine 3 close, but not identical frequencies for these and their phase alignment. For a given key at a given velocity, the amplitude is probably easily described as a function of time. Applying this envelope to the phase aligned fundamental frequency mashup thingy and subtracting it from the sample would probably remove most of the energy of the sample. All of that data that was removed could be easily represented in a handful of parameters that would take only a few bits and could be stored as metadata. The residual sample data could then be expressed with far fewer bits. As big a pain in the butt as this would be, all the heavy lifting is on the encoding side. The decoding is much simpler. A lot more refinement would be needed to achieve a 10:1 compression ratio. Neat idea, but why waste the time developing from scratch some crazy algorithm when you can just tailor something like zip and get the same result. I think Football is right, this thread is nuts. Probably need a new thread just to debate the compression algorithm.

I may be misinterpreting this but weren't Christians results a saving of just 8% with the zip and 29% with the rar? This is lossless in that the complete file is re-created on decoding (un-zipping) So the question is: is the VSL system actually a zip like function where the exact file is reconstructed on decoding (unlikely, i would guess at 10:1) or in fact data compression where 90% of the original data is removed forever? And if this is the case how much is this changing the original sound quality. I would have thought most good musicians/engineers would detect 10:1 compression ratios in A/B comparison however good the algorithms used - particularly when there is low level ambience involved (the room mics recordings)

Julian

@Aldo Esplay said:

I have to agree with you Julian in the sense that if you simply overlaid two samples, even if the velocity was identical and phases were aligned as much as possible at the beginning of the sample, that by the end the two would be out of phase. However, mdovey's approach would need little modification to do a pretty good job. With Christian's test with zipping one of the files, I doubt anything this cumbersome is needed, but here's the idea. Most of the energy of the string is at some fundamental frequency. Since a good number of the keys in the piano have three strings, technically you'd have to determine 3 close, but not identical frequencies for these and their phase alignment. For a given key at a given velocity, the amplitude is probably easily described as a function of time. Applying this envelope to the phase aligned fundamental frequency mashup thingy and subtracting it from the sample would probably remove most of the energy of the sample. All of that data that was removed could be easily represented in a handful of parameters that would take only a few bits and could be stored as metadata. The residual sample data could then be expressed with far fewer bits. As big a pain in the butt as this would be, all the heavy lifting is on the encoding side. The decoding is much simpler. A lot more refinement would be needed to achieve a 10:1 compression ratio. Neat idea, but why waste the time developing from scratch some crazy algorithm when you can just tailor something like zip and get the same result. I think Football is right, this thread is nuts. Probably need a new thread just to debate the compression algorithm.

I may be misinterpreting this but weren't Christian's results a saving of just 8% with the zip and 29% with the rar? This is lossless in that the complete file is re-created on decoding (un-zipping) So the question is: is the VSL system actually a zip like function where the exact file is reconstructed on decoding (unlikely, i would guess at 10:1) or in fact data compression where 90% of the original data is removed forever? And if this is the case how much is this changing the original sound quality. I would have thought most good musicians/engineers would detect 10:1 compression ratios in A/B comparison however good the algorithms used - particularly when there is low level ambience involved (the room mics recordings)

Julian

so finally you come to the same conclusion i've already posted earlier - most if not all is all aquestion of the dictionary ;-)

i fact it was a must - to have a piano needing 5 GB or more per mic position would have been limiting ...

christian

@Football said:

Good Lord, this thread is nuts.  Very much looking forward to more demos.

Here they are, two great pieces produced by Jay Bacal, this time you can hear the piano in a chamber music context (with bassoon or trumpet)

http://vsl.co.at/en/67/702/704/414.htm

Saint - Saens, Bassoon Sonata 3rd mov

Steven Halsey, Trumpet Sonata - Allegro

best

Herb

Ah, that's great.  Any closer perspective/more contemporary sounding demos coming soon?

Contemporary demos would be great....  also, I would love to hear something in more of a cinematic type of setting... the soft piano behind the orchestra.  That's what I'm mostly looking for... - that and more of the the close perspective.

Chopin coming up.

@Football said:

Good Lord, this thread is nuts.  Very much looking forward to more demos.

Here they are, two great pieces produced by Jay Bacal, this time you can hear the piano in a chamber music context (with bassoon or trumpet)

http://vsl.co.at/en/67/702/704/414.htm

Saint - Saens, Bassoon Sonata 3rd mov

Steven Halsey, Trumpet Sonata - Allegro

best

Herb

Excellent demos Jay.

Was unfamiliar with these pieces and have enjoyed them both. The Imperial sounds brilliant, even if a little too much in the background to my ears. Wouldn't complain if you or someone else demos the 1st movement of Shostakovich's No.2 (or the whole lot for that matter).

Will invest regardless!

Colin

Just listened to the most recent piano demos, the trumpet sonata features beautifully the trumpet as well. Very nice!

Lovely delicate piano playing (or programming) in the Saint-Saens, the basson: very realistic. I find the piano slightly too much in the background in this one, but that's a question of taste. But both pieces sound very convincing overall. Great work Jay!

Great demos ..but I don't get a sense of the piano sustain 'bloom' that you can get on a real piano. At least on my Bechstein at home the sustain is amazing. I would like to hear some more creative pedalling and some louder passages with the soft pedal. Many pianists ignore the louder tone of the soft pedal which is very expressive.

No matter what the demos sound like I'll never know if this piano works for me or not until I try it for a few hours.  I'm hoping this will be the last sampled piano I'll have to buy for a long time.