Kawai Piano Prices: Synthogy Ivory Grand Piano 1.5 Virtual Instrument Review

This is the first electronic instrument I tried playing which is comparable to playing a real grand piano. Of course the experience is not the same, for a variety of subtle reasons. It is starting to come pretty close, though, and if you are not in a position to have your own Steinway grand in a dedicated music room, you might find that a state of the art virtual instrument like Ivory gives a bigger boost to your playing than a run-of-the-mill real instrument.

I thought quite a lot about just why pianos are so difficult to imitate electronically. My feeling is that the difference between Ivory and a real piano sound reduces to two main areas. The first is true sympathetic resonance. Ivory has a dedicated DSP engine for simulating the interaction of strings through the sounding board,however this only works en masse. The algorithm does not take into account which which keys are down, hence the ringing effect of notes sounded in succession, or chords struck at the same time is not really there.

The other area is just the pure audio soundscape. No matter how fancy the software is, you are still listening to a signal relayed through cables, amplifiers, speakers, etc., subject to all the pitfalls of electronic sound reproduction. It's just not the same. The limitations of stereo are particularly evident. Anyone who has played a concert grand can relate to feeling the presence of the sound, emanating not just from the left or the right, but particular places in space. Two channels cannot possibly reproduce this.

Having said all this, some of the samples in Ivory are breathtakingly beautiful. The recordings were clearly done on top notch instruments and with great care. Ivory gets you pretty involved in the sound engineering process by offering a number of tunable parameters including various filters, key noise, resonance, etc.. It is interesting to gain an appreciation of the fact that there are always compromises involved, and sound reproduction is about much more than playing back exactly what has been recorded. The flexibility of being able to adjust your instrument to your taste and the demands of each piece you play is an added bonus that you don't get with a real instrument.

I was surprised to find how much of a boost Ivory gave to my playing, both in terms of creativity and in terms of technique. A good instrument allows one to hear more, and express more subtle nuances, even at the advanced amateur level that I am at. It also brings out deficiencies of one's playing in high relief.

I listened to lots of mp3 samples, tried Ivory out in a music shop, but I still found it very difficult to gauge what it was going to be like as an instrument until I actually took it home. As I understand, the main competitor at the moment is Akustik Piano, which I can't really comment on, since that I have not bought. It's important to note that Ivory needs a host application, such as Cubase, ProTools, or something similar.

One final note: the hardware demands of Ivory need to be taken seriously. Contrary to the product description above, Ivory actually contains 41GB of samples that need to be fit on a hard drive somewhere. Because Ivory streams in samples on demand, this has to be a fairly fast drive, and preferably not the main drive used by the host application. I haven't tried using the same drive, and the way I am using Ivory now there does not seem to be too much on the flyloading, but even with the setup I now have, loading a new instrument takes about 10-15 seconds. I did have a lot of streaming when I tried playing with just 512 MB of RAM, and in fact with that configuration the instrument was basically unplayable. The 1.5 GB I now have seems sufficient to hold all samples in RAM.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Synthogy Ivory Grand Piano 1.5 Virtual Instrument

Product Description:
The ultimate virtual grand piano! Over 3,500 samples are combined with a sample-playback engine built from the ground up to bring out the resonance, response and character of the world's finest Concert Grands. Ivory?s superb piano samples were brought to life using no-compromise technology in the finest studios and concert halls. The sessions were produced by Joe Ierardi, an accomplished pianist and award winning sound designer and producer of piano modules for Kurzweil Music Systems®. Ierardi?s unique expertise covers every aspect of piano design, from tuning and regulation, to recording, editing, programming and engine design. More than 20 Gigabytes of stunning, all NEW, Acoustic Grand Piano sampled instruments: German Steinway® D 9' Concert Grand; Bösendorfer® 290 Imperial Grand; Yamaha® C7 Grand (Each piano can be installed separately)Synthogy's exclusive, powerful 32 bit Sample Playback and DSP engine, engineered specifically for recreating the acoustic pianoSympathetic String Resonance DSP for realistic Damper Pedal responseWorld class digital FX including Real Ambience, Chorus and EQCustomizable with User controls for Timbre, Stereo Width and Perspective, Velocity Response, Mechanical Key Noise, Tuning and moreExpertly tuned and regulated pianos in world-class studios and concert hallsPhase-perfect stereo samples stored in 32 bits!All 88 keys individually sampled in up to 8 dynamic levels (plus Bösendorfer extended low octave)In...

Get 9% OFF