Piano Recordings

[Lon Armstrong]

I like Leslie Howard's piano recordings of Liszt works (especially the Beethoven transcriptions) on Hyperion cd. Good piano, good digital sound.

I've enjoyed the sound of the piano on RVG recordings, especially a lot of the mono early ones. The thing that amazes me about that is two or three times a week in the first few decades a different pianist at those keys and you can really hear the differences of touch and sound!

[Strabo]

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On 6/4/2004 8:26:14 AM paulparrot wrote:

Not the case with Vinylfreak, though. He complains of piano being recorded too quietly. Seems like what Vinylfreak is reacting to is a recording with *proper* dynamic range. If it happens to have just a little portion that is really loud, the forte of the pianoforte, and the majority is fairly subdued, he could easily consider the recording as being made too quietly, when in actuality it just has not had its dynamics squashed.

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I think you nailed it Paul.

Vinylfreak, the cheapest and simplest solution would be to not listen to piano on your set-up. Seriously.

Don't make the mistake that I did. I purchased a used LP of Beethoven piano sonata's on the Gale label. Inside the front cover the label places a warning. The warning states, there is no distortion on this recording. If you experience distortion there is a problem with your playback system in either the cartridge, amplification, or speakers.

I played the LP anyway and yep, I had lots of distortion. Since then I have replaced everything but the speakers. TT, cart, phono stage, patch cords, pre-amp, speaker cables, six different amps and now the LP plays properly with no distortion.

This LP has become my system test. Little did I know when I bought the LP used for $80 that it would cause me to go broke. But now I'm broke and happy because everything sounds good to me. Sadly, I know it could still be better if I only had the time and money to invest in it.

So my suggestion is to not go down that slippery slope. It could start a never ending audio journey.

[laikadog]

I consider myself to be on the bottom slopes of the learning curve where it comes to understanding the technical nuances of recording techniques, but here are a couple links to some information I found very informative.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~boyk/

http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~boyk/records.html

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~boyk/351.htm

http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~boyk/bothsides.html

Whether you agree or disagree with the philosophy/reslts of Professor Boyk, there is a tremendous amount of food for thought. I've been meaning to get the Boyk plays Mussorgsky 1991 "Pictures at an Exhibition", for some time now and listen for myself. Maybe this is a good catalyst to get me off my rear and give it a go.

Is anyone familiar with any of these redordings.

[Parrot]

Thanks, laikadog. Lots of interesting reading.

[artto]

All I can say is, a number of people who played piano, majoring music at the university level, as well a relative (by marriage) who won 1st place in piano competition in Canada, who have heard my system have said This is the first time Ive ever heard recorded piano sound like a piano. This goes back to the old analog days (pre CD era) as well as more recently.

One of my favorite piano recordings is departed Glen Gould playing Bachs Goldberg Variations. Surprisingly (to me), this is not on an audiophile label. Its on CBS Masterworks. Dont play it too loud at first. Its quite dynamic. If your listening room/area is not auditorium quiet, you may not be able to benefit from the low level nuances, encouraging you to turn it up too loud to hear these things.

[Parrot]

Art,

What is the ambient noise level of your room typically?

[vinylfreak]

Well, being 'quiet' isn't exactly a problem, but the hiss just seems to be loud on the quiet passages. It's so annoying that I like to just go into the other room and listen (where the hiss is less audible to me)

[LarryC]

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On 6/4/2004 3:21:38 PM vinylfreak wrote:

Well, being 'quiet' isn't exactly a problem, but the hiss just seems to be loud on the quiet passages. It's so annoying that I like to just go into the other room and listen (where the hiss is less audible to me)

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I'm puzzled, too. It almost sounds like your CD source is playing at too low a level, and you have to turn your preamp up way far, to the point that preamp hiss becomes audible.

I have a wide variety and large number of piano recordings, but almost no problems with too low a recording level in quiet passages. Solo pianos can be, and I think usually are, recorded at a relatively high level, so that noise in the recording itself is barely audible -- hence my thought that it's preamp hiss you're hearing.

Do you only have this problem with piano CDs, or with all of them? What about your LP piano recordings?

Larry

[artto]

Paul, I dont know (lol), its well below the residual reading of SPL meter and even the spectrum analyzer in Sound Forge. Lets just say that when you walk into the room, even if the door is open, you hear a substantial quietness in the room. With everything closed up its very quiet. The biggest problem are 727 jets. When taking off heading west, their engines are firing towards the outside of the front wall (best I can tell, Im about 5 or 6 miles from the nearest runways at OHare and 727 are the worst case scenario). Under these conditions, as soon as even the most quiet sound passage can be heard from the speakers, it almost always drowns out any jet noise.

Vinylfreak, Ive found (& many people still try to argue against me on this) that the acoustical properties of the room can exaggerate or attenuate certain aspects of the recording and/or system performance. It is possible that, for what ever reason, your listening space is somehow exaggerating noise of the equipment and/or certain aspects of the recording. This could be due to the way the sound is diffused in the room & at what frequencies, absorption & at what frequencies, reverberation time at certain frequencies, etc, etc.

But dont feel too bad. Richard Heyser in his extensive review of the Klipschorn in Audio magazine in the 80s mentioned a similar experience as yours, and was somewhat perplexed that listening to a piano recording outside of the room the speakers were in produced a very convincing rendition of a live piano being played.

In my room/system, the objective has always been, not only to get things to the point where the speakers disappear, but also to the point where the room disappears as well. For the most part, I think that has been achieved.

[WMcD]

My recall is that the Heyster review of the K-Horn made some mention about piano. If he was in the next room, the piano sounded realistic, i.e. as if it was in the room with the K-Horns. But in the same room the illusion wasn't there.

I suspect that there are a number of problems with imaging. One is that the piano is probably the largest instrument. So that might make every mike placement wrong, unless the mike is far away. Then you pick up the acoustics of the recording environment.

A second may be that the piano is the instrument we're most likely to have heard in a small room, and many small rooms. You might need an anechoic recording to make it sound realistic in your small room.

Just guesswork.

Gil