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noooo, SSS is another thing.... kawaian please stop it, i'm the owner of CLP330, i swear it does have damper resonance, you can clearly see the button on the picture above.

What does your piano do differently when the damper resonance light is on versus off?

theJourney
It's not just on/off, it has 20 levels.
It sounds like some kind of resonance ) I don't know how to describe it, I will upload a sample later.
And honestly I don't know what the difference between "Damper Resonance" and "Stereo Sustain Samples", Yamaha descriptions are not very clear about that.

@bkmz, I guess I need to apologize! After reading a little bit more in the CLP-330/340/370 user manual it became clear that Damper resonance is applied to all of these models. Sorry for that misunderstanding!

But, in excuse to my misinterpretation, the Yamaha website is extremely uninformative about their model features. Furthermore I could not find any explanation on what the difference of damper resonance and Stereo sustain samples is...

So be it, nothing wrong with your MP3 contribution and dewsters analysis!

The question also becomes what then is "string resonance" on the CLP-380?

Does anyone have access to a 380 to give dewster a file?

String resonance is the resonance of individual keys pressed down while you play other keys (all with pedal up). This will result in some harmonic or even disharmonic resonance depending on which key is pressed.

My KAWAI CA63 has both damper resonance and and string resonance.

Sorry for the confusion. Is it me, or does it seem like different manufacturers call these things by different technical sounding names?

One of the main things I love about the sound of an acoustic piano is when the damper pedal down, and all of the strings are allowed to vibrate in sympathy with whatever other notes are being played. I've been calling that sympathetic resonance, but perhaps that's not the standard accepted term for the phenomena? I really like it but it is often done poorly, so I want to know about it, hence the DPBSD test for it.

I realize that there are damperless treble strings always sitting there doing whatever they want all the time, and I'm not sure what the accepted term for that is. And some people get rather excited about being able to silently press and hold some keys while playing others and having just those notes free to resonate - is there a consensus on what to call that? I don't test for these things specifically because I'm more interested in bulk pedal-down sympathetic resonance.

And then there is the sound of the dampers themselves going up and down with the damper pedal. I call these pedal up/down sounds.

If I'm doing something horribly wrong with my terminology, please let me know and I'll change it. I did try to clarify and explain these things in the readme file, perhaps I should change that section?

Here is a waveform (amplitude vs time) view of the sympathetic resonance test of the CLP-330, where the same notes are played twice, on the left the pedal is up, on the right the pedal is down:



Clearly visually and audibly something is definitely going on.

Here is an MP3 of the second and third phases of the sympathetic resonance test for the CLP-330, which corresponds exactly to the image above:

http://www.pianoworld.com/Uploads/files/clp330_res_5.mp3

Listen in particular to the last several seconds of the file. All of the rich piano sound devolves into a dull, single note buzz. This is why I tend to harp on Yamaha sympathetic resonance - it is generally a very poorly done delay effect.

This is a Clavinova too, so call me crazy but I kind of expect more from this premiere line.

AFAIK that's damper resonance.



AFAIK that's string resonance.



agreed.

Additionally you also have key off samples (the subtle sound that occurs when you release a key and pedal is up).

I agree with Dewster's terminology. Whether it is pedal down or just one note softly struck to lift the damper on that note I would call it all sympathetic resonance personally. If you think about it it amounts to exactly the same thing....ie, a string or strings with the damper lifted (whether by key strike or pedal press) and thus being free to vibrate in sympathy with played notes.

The DP makers, especially Yamaha, have made it unnecessarily complicated probably in order to increase the perceived added value to different instruments within the same range as per the Clavinova line.

Steve

I would also agree, but pianomakers (not only Yamaha) have different expressions for this since they implement not all of these in all of their DP models.

e.g. Yamaha:

CLP-320 nothing...
CLP-330 damper resonance (as I learned today...)
CLP-340+370 damper resonance, Stereo sustain sample(what's that?), key-off sample
CLP-380 damper resonance, Stereo sustain sample(what's that?), key-off sample, string resonance

have you ever taken about consumer electronics? As an example, Sony might make a line of five DVD players that all look alike except for the higher end, more expensive models might have some extra buttons to allow access to more features.

Take them apart and you find the circuit boards are identical and the low cost model has a blank place where a switch was not soldered down. I'd not be surprised if Yamaha used the same electronics in several DPs.

I think "Stereo sustain sample" is maybe what I call a "pedal-down" sample with a "loom of strings" sound - when the damper pedal is pressed in a real piano it excites all of the strings slightly.

What they call "key-off" I call "key-up" and I think that's clear. Sometimes it's a knock sound, sometimes it's the buzzy sound of a string being damped. Same for the "pedal-up sound".

"Damper resonance" strikes me as insufficiently descriptive and also confusing. Though I can see why they are trying to differentiate what is usually implemented as a global delay effect from something that is more complex - what they term "string resonance".

You do realize how dangerous these statements are above, don't you?

Soon, dewster will not be requesting us to send him mp3 files but to open up our cases and photograph our circuit boards!

The third generation of the thread will have us all jockeying with soldering irons...

Not to mention that colleen/snazzy (the same person) will then go metaphysical-on-our-a** and will further demean dewster for violating the "soul" of the digital instrument by "opening it up" (sic) to even further scrutiny! They prefer darkness to light, and sit in wonderment at the marketing departments across the globe.

If DPs have souls, does that mean we'll have them in heaven?

If my DP breaks, do I need to give it a proper church service and burial?

Yamaha CLP-330 Visual Results

Below are some of the results of Yamaha CLP-330. The text review was posted earlier in this thread.

Kind of disappointing for a Clavinova class instrument.


Spectral pan view of the note C4. Cursor at end of sample / start of loop. Sample length is 1.9 seconds, loop length is 0.5 seconds. Loop periods here are not easy to see and require compression to reveal the details. I decided to not do that here so that the sample / loop transition would be clearer.


Spectral pan view of the note C5. Cursor at end of sample / start of loop. Sample length is 0.8 seconds, loop length is 0.8 seconds.


Spectral pan view of the note C7. Cursor at end of sample / start of loop. Sample length is 0.8 seconds, loop length is 0.2 seconds.


Spectral phase view the layer test. Smooth timbral variation with no visible or audible layer switching (to me; however the owner reports bad and audible layer switching).


Spectral pan view the stretch test. The mid notes are shown here. Stretching is present and audible over the entire range, which is unusual.

These and more pix for the CLP-330, as well as the text review and MP3, are posted at the sharepoint for those who are interested.

If anyone can send me a DPBSD MP3 of the CLP-370 or 380 that would be great.

I have a theory about Clavinovas, and wonder if others think the same way.

These are "cabinetry" DPs, so people are most likely buying them to put in living rooms and such because they feel stage pianos or in-between units like the P-155 are too ugly. Nothing wrong with that, as long as people realize they're paying a hefty premium for it.

Anyway, "cabinetry" DPs usually have fairly decent amp/speaker sound systems in them (as DPs go, that is - in actuality they are rather far from ideal) that people like because they want to play without a lot of fuss and bother. Playing through flat headphones, or particularly through external flat active studio monitors, would be unusual. I think also the "cabinetry" DP buyer tends to be coming at a DP purchase from more of an acoustic piano angle, rather than a sampler angle, and therefore tends to be less savvy in terms of the technical limitations of DP sounds.

Manufacturers know this, and they also know the rather lame built-in sound system will mask many otherwise audible issues with the sample playback. So they feel a bit freer to hack away on the sample set, using shorter and fewer attack and loop samples, cutting corners on the sympathetic resonance and reverb algorithms, etc.

Does that sound crazy? It certainly seems to be the case for the CLP-330 anyway.

yes it does. Just contact the manufacturer directly, you should get some kind of answer back, and if you're lucky you'll get an answer from one of the techs. My feeling is that the current set of pianos is it is all about hybrid technology, half samples, half modeling. And because hybrid tech is in its infancy, piano makers tend to use fewer samples than they should, because they want to show off their modeling software.

GEM did the hybrid thing YEARS ago, as in almost 10 years ago. Few people cared though. I don't know why. They went outta business. So now Yammy is jumping on the bandwagon.

Drewster, thanks for redoing Pianoteq. Just wanna point out that key release is present while pedaling. Maybe it's more difficult to hear with all the resonance, but if you increase the key release noise parameter, you'll hear it's there.

I think GEM's claim to fame was that they were way ahead of everyone else in the sympathetic resonance department. In their earlier models they used a single layer sample and filtering or something, which was interesting too. But as much as I wanted to get on the GEM bandwagon, their samples were still sounded like they were looped with short decay, which killed it for me and perhaps others.

I've reached the point where I really can't justify spending any money on weak or fake sound of any sort, particularly when $500 of PC hardware and $300 of software will routinely blow the doors off almost all DPs out there, some of which cost over five times as much.