Roland is on record that the V-Piano is 100% modeling, which is what I'm basing my claim on. It remains for someone to prove them wrong, I guess. It won't be me. V-Piano is not worth it. It sounds like a Roland, not a Steinway, or Bosendorfer - as Roland also claims. And so the marketing-speak goes, round and round. (Don't get me wrong, it plays superbly, just doesn't sound like my ideal of a real piano.)

Lawrence

As J.D. lately looks like his own death mask, I think you need a better comparison there. The thought of waking up next to Johnny Depp -- the horror, the horror! "21, Jump Street" was a long time ago...

Well, the OP said he could hear frequency shifts in certain sounds that can only be explained by them being samples played back at different speeds. But I wouldn't hold that against Roland anyway if they used samples -- Pianoteq is pure modeling, TruePianos is modeling plus samples, and I prefer the latter. If it sounds good enough, I like it, and it doesn't matter how the sound is produced.

But yes, that's my point, that both Pianoteq and the V-Piano really always just sound like differently voiced pianos of the same make, and not like different models.

[/quote]

As J.D. lately looks like his own death mask, I think you need a better comparison there. The thought of waking up next to Johnny Depp -- the horror, the horror! "21, Jump Street" was a long time ago...
[/quote]

He was a bit young for my taste in 21 jump street. By about 20-30 years. He's all growed up now and still looks good to me. Besides, just as with the V, it's not all about looks. It's the mystery, talent and the good sense to live in France.

And he was too old for me then. I mean 13 years older, I couldn't fathom why the girls in the class went nuts over such a geezer. But on the whole I don't think he's the Cary Grant type who improves significantly with age. He deteriorated rapidly in the last five years (since "Finding Neverland") and looks emaciated in the face and unwell, no matter how much brown makeup they smeared in his face for his gangster epic. Another 10 years and he will look like Keith Richards -- or Keith Richards' dad.

"Blood brothers", that says it all. The family connection is established.

And he was too old for me then. I mean 13 years older, I couldn't fathom why the girls in the class went nuts over such a geezer. But on the whole I don't think he's the Cary Grant type who improves significantly with age. He deteriorated rapidly in the last five years (since "Finding Neverland") and looks emaciated in the face and unwell, no matter how much brown makeup they smeared in his face for his gangster epic. Another 10 years and he will look like Keith Richards -- or Keith Richards' dad.


Meow!

I wrote some notes while reading the posts:

@Medialworks: incorrect, Roland claims is not based on samples, never talked about physical modeling. That makes me think. Why aren't they talking about physical modeling? Patents problems and stuff? Anyway you can look here http://www.rolandus.com/products/productdetails.php?ProductId=978&ParentId=72

@Medialworks music & Martin C Doege: ok for the damper pedal, but the duplex scale? That should be modeled as well in a "modeling piano"! And I could only spot that because it was buggy. I imagine there's more samples working below you don't notice. I'm just playing the role of the picky-one, I'm not discussing the fact the main sound is phy modeling and it's nice.
On the other hand as someone said, if samples make it feel good, why not? I can imagine for roland it would have been so unpleasant to say "97.5% sound is modeled", so just floored it to 100%, can't it be an explanation?

Someone said pianTeq and Vpiano just sounds the same: phy modeling techniques are much different one from another, and are implemented in totally different ways, so I wouldn't give for granted that a Vpiano sounds like a Pianoteq etc.
Anyways it could be they both have a similar characteristic or feature in their sound, a common problem, then, they should try to address...

from Martin:

I quote! Absolutely!

Martin, you need to grab your Moonlight Sonata sheetmusic, drive on down to denver and test this thing out. let us know what you think. me and nikalette believe you will experience this profound digital epiphany. i'm heading over to guitar center this morning (those poor schmoes never get a day off..) and give it another whirl...

fat and flat:

Looking forward to your next review.

Who or what is Ryan Seacrest? Same query for 21 Jump Street.
Somehow I have a feeling I've not missed a lot.

Hi Jake,

well i went back over there to GC. they were willing to knock 15% off to @ $5100 so i would tell everybody- don't pay more than that. i had noticed musiciansfriend.com online had broken price about a week ago. like everything else in retail, there are too many retailers fighting for share and once a supplier lets one break price, well you should never pay more than that. its still too much, anyway. i would like to buy from GC, because they at least provided me with a board to try out- the online guys can NEVER offer a service like that, you know...(but they provide a valuable pricing arbitrage function!).. i talked with the keyboard manager and he told me he was nervous about how this was going to work out. most stores will be lucky to have a piano on display and another one in the back in the box. there ain't no way i'm paying $5K+ for a display board. so i can tell these guys are really hoping Roland is willing to make the investment of having an expensive board out there for people to play with. right now, the market is strictly studios and pros. roland is hoping studios will really gravitate towards this, one of the salesmen there who works in a studio was telling me pianos drive studio technicians nuts, one musician will demand it be tuned a certain way and then immediately after that another musician will stomp around and ask what moron had it tuned like that... they are "hoping" this technology will at some point "replace" acoustic pianos for all but the van cliburn types. I'm not a pro, it sounds terrific to me, but i can tell i'm being influenced by my fingers more than my ears. it really is first and foremost a playing experience. I asked the guy if i could drag my DAW into the showroom and record for about 15 minutes to take home and burn to a CD to see what it sounded like. he sorta said OK once he figured out i wasn't ready to bite. so i guess i will try to take it to that level... anyway, i had fun playing it once i got the sales guy to turn off the disco rap blasting out from the speaker room (why DO they do that there?...). The Vintage pianos DO sound different. i am too unwashed to know if vintage 1 is true steinway and vintage 2 is a bos, but they truly have different characteristics to them. i had originally gravitated towards vintage 2 but today the first one sounded more colorful for the type of jazz/pop/rock/gibberish that i "noodle" (per Martin)around with. 2 is definitely more classical. and Silver 1- it makes a great rock/gospel sound. doesn't sound artificial to me at all. Jerry Lee would dig it. The ambience control is better than i thought, very simple, no "rooms" to choose, you don't have to figure out how far out in the parking lot to move the mikes, just turn the knob a little and you get a little air in there. i detuned the silver one and hardened the hammers and it makes a great rocker sound. So I am sold on it, although i would like to record it first to make sure its not all an illusion. but i come from a different place than most of you, i am an older boomer- i want simplicity. i want to give my wife my music computer and just be able to run a board right into a DAW and skip all the star wars stuff. this would allow me to do that, more playing, arranging and less cursing at Windows..... ya'll have a nice 4th...

Jump Street is an old TV show that I never watched...Johnny Depp's first exposure. Then he started making great movies and trying not to exploit his good looks.

Ryan seacrest is a multimedia industry, hosts "American Idol", radio shows etc....He's just kind of phony and tiny, and probably gay, not that there's anything wrong with it, but for a girl, not a romantic fantasy. AllPERSONALITY with a capital P.

J Depp is mysterious, talented, a man of few words and gorgeous. I used to tell people he was my fiance till he moved in with that French actress and started making babies.

F&F, with the $5100 do you get a stand? It's encouraging that the price is coming down. The mark-up has got to be huge at this point, but with the recession.....This is one I would buy online out of state because with tax in California, even at $5100, that's another $500.

Anyway, the playing experience, w hich for me was the touch and responsiveness, while not quite as important as the sound, is huge, so I really don't care if I'm being influenced by that, since I'll be doing Just Piano, classical, jazz, rock/blues etc...and singing.

F/F what's DAW?

Nikalette, the price includes the stand (very sturdy- custom made for it- i wouldn't trust the generics stands with it)and the 3 pedal unit. i don't think the seat comes with it but i am not sure. there are some other options you can buy with it, a CD rom unit that goes underneath etc. DAW - Digital Audio Workstation- a standalone multi-track recorder "box". I have a Yamaha AW 16G, which has been replaced by the AW1600 (i think). there are oodles of them and they run from $300 to a couple thousand depending on number of inputs/tracks and sophistication of the imbedded software. a lot of people use computer programs instead, such as Logic for Apple and Cubase etc for Windows. i like the dedicated hardware box myself. as i said, i would love to get the computer out of the middle of everything! i understand your point about taxes- it is a real consideration with something this expensive (GA's sales tax is 8%!). but Ahnold really needs the money. and don't you have to fill out some california tax form for internet purchases? (ha, right!)

PS: the GC manager said the units had about $1000/profit in them at list price. i don't know if that is only GC's margin or both roland and GC's... right now, they aren't producing enough to have real critical mass so i wouldn't argue his figures. but you figure if they can double/triple production they can probably get down the cost curve pretty quickly. DSP's / RAM are pretty cheap, i guess the cost is in the action (as must be all the weight)

Of course there are rooms, and halls and stages to select from. Reading the manual would reveal how to access these.

Lawrence

Well, I think noodling actually works great as a test, but only if you do the noodling yourself according to what you want to hear, not if somebody else does it. If somebody else demos it then I think a recognizable piece that you've already heard a thousand times (like the love theme from Titanic, a Chopin nocturne, or something by Bach) is more useful to pick up fine nouances.

The Denver GC is apparently the GC for poor people. The money is in the mountains here, so I suppose GC Aspen (if there is one there) has V-Pianos wall-to-wall.

I'm going to Cologne next week where there's a huge music store, so I'd expect them to have it...

I agree that everything directly to do with the strings should be modeled, except the very-high frequency stuff like damper noise. But of course marketing speak always tends to make outrageous claims, such as 100% modeled. It sounds better, and unless you reverse engineer the software on the V-Piano, you can't really prove them wrong, although the anomalies you noticed in the sound are a pretty strong indication of samples. Maybe the product was rushed to completion (it's supposedly been in the works for 10 years), so 100% modeled was probably the intention 10 years ago when they started, but then it turned out it didn't sound as good, so they put some samples in. Just my speculation.

When you look in the academic papers, physmod seems to be always the same: divide the string into say 100 segments, simulate the interaction with a hammer (represented as a round, somewhat soft entity on a spring in the models) and the soundboard. Obviously Roland and Pianoteq must have made advancements since then, such as the effect of an open or closed lid on the sound, string resonance, etc. But fundamentally I think it's well understood how physical modeling of a piano sound works. The challenge is doing it in realtime and still having it sound good. The V-Piano seems to have more CPU horsepower, which would logically mean they could simulate a brighter, more "overtony" sound, as opposed to the more CPU-starved, darker-sounding Pianoteq.

Unfortunately, I don't have the time for that forum right now, but then again I think my objections are very similar to what other people who take issue with the PT sound say, so I think basically the devs know what the objections are.

And I'm not sure if complaining helps, when the algorithms of PT are probably a trade secret. I really only like to complain when I also can offer an idea of a possible solution...

per Martin:
"The V-Piano seems to have more CPU horsepower, which would logically mean they could simulate a brighter, more "overtony" sound, as opposed to the more CPU-starved, darker-sounding Pianoteq."

Bingo. that would be my observation...

Not to mention the fact that you can voice and regulate the whole keyboard, or sweet spots, and make it exactly how you want it to sound for certain songs and then save that setting. Can't you save up to 100 settings on the V piano? They have 20 presets.

Hey no one told me anything about a sales tax form. The sellers have to do that, don't they? Arnold has plenty of money, it's just being spent badly.

Anyway, does the V piano have a built in recorder? I guess I need to think about getting something if it doesn't. No doubt it has no input for a microphone, so if I wanted to play and sing, I would have to set all that up separately.
I really need to take a class in this. When I try to find info online, it's just so technical it's way over my head.

I'm actually pretty good with computers in general but I never learned anything about the musical thing, I don't even know how to put songs on facebook or my space. I bought Cakewalk but it just seems so awkward.

All I have is an Olympus recorder and a Flip camera.

Nikalette- the vpiano has a 1 track recorder/sequencer. so you could play and record and i imagine there is some way to save it into a song file that can be downloaded to your computer. one-track is pretty hard to work with. you have to play the whole song flawlessly or your screwed. the Yamaha CP300 and my older p-250 have 16 track sequencers, so you can record more easily/ seamlessly in segments. but, yes, it can record....

a pretty good website to look at to learn about the digital music production/recording world- particularly for amateur home/ham operators is:

http://www.tweakheadz.com/

i am not sure if he is keeping it current but it explains how all the terminology and the equipment used etc.

Thanks for the link. I'll check it out.

On the V, doesn't it have a port that you could put a flash drive into? I'm okay with trying to record it perfectly. It's mainly performance practice anyway.

The algorithms Pianoteq uses are purposely scaled back so that it can run on older computers. Future versions will likely increase the complexity of the algorithms, at the expense of greater CPU usage.

Even when I reach the polyphony limit of 256 on Pianoteq, CPU usage doesn't reach 15% on an i7 processor.

Since they have sliders for almost everything else in PT, I don't understand why there isn't a checkbox or something for "please waste more CPU cycles on generating the sound." I'd gladly do with lower polyphony if I can get a better sound.

Of course they should continue to support older machines/notebooks, so flexibility is key...

I have to agree with Martin. it makes no sense for them to "hold back" on any technology available to their users because of concerns over CPU power. if they got it, they should show it. they'd be doing me a big favor, because to my ears they aren't competitive with rolands effort. but that is just the way i am wired for sound, i guess...

on the Roland US website there are endorsement videos from George Duke and Myron McKinley from Earth, Wind, and Fire. Both videos are outstanding in my opinion. but on another blog i heard somebody really criticizing how synthetic the piano sounded on Duke's video. i dunno, maybe so. i get confused if i am listening for wood or metal. but if you listen to him change to various pianos, you would have to be one really critical player not to find something there that sounded good and..usable. and i guess that is the problem, classical pianists are looking for a certain definitive sound, while jazz/pop players need something else, and everybody's ears are different. on pianoteq, i did NOT find the M3 piano to be a good pop piano. i hope they get it right, and its a shame that roland's product is so expensive that it really doesn't effectively create head-to-head competition.

Well despite my infatuation with the Roland, I've gone for something a lot more economical until all the kinks and the price work themselves out. I would have held out longer, but I found a really low sale price on the keyboard I've been looking at, and I just can't practice on the 61 key Casio I've been using. I have no piano at the moment and it's driving me crazy.