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Hi Guys, i have a Dell 820 laptop (going to turn 6 years old this month) - I put windows 7 64 bit on it last year. Runs the Galaxy pianos just fine. But I was wondering if this will run the Ivory American Concert D. I have a newer 7200 RPM internal sata drive that reads about 70-80 MB/s. My processor is a Core 2 - T7200 @ 2.0 Mhz. It's probably right at the min. specs and I wondered if anyone is running similar setup.

Looks like your system meets the recommended specs to me, but I don't have it - sorry.

Just btw, in case you aren't aware, if you want to do any recording, and if you use a DAW that supports offline rendering, then you will be able to increase your polyphony (voices) to whatever you want for the render, because the offline render will always produce a perfect result no matter what. My understanding is that offline rendering is pretty standard. (do any NOT support it? I don't know)
An offline render works like a cartoonist drawing the frames of a cartoon - it doesn't matter how fast or how slow they do the work, as long as each frame is drawn correctly that's all that matters.

Greg.

Ivory 1.6 runs perfectly on a Pentium 4 machine, So hopefully no problems for American D on Core 2 machine.

What you need to care about is ram, for Win 7, at least 4 GB is recommended to run VST's - If you dont have an Audio interfac, use ASIO4all

Any questions let me know

FWIW, I've had a bit of a play with the American D using try-sound.com.

I can't be certain yet, but from my testing, I don't think the American D has particularly clever voice management, and it will consume many voices for repeating notes - more than it needs to.
I have the same issue with EWQLP - it is absolutely brain dead.

The test I did was to set the voice limit relatively low (24, I think it was), play and hold a bass note, and then in the right hand repeat a three note chord, rapidly. (all without the sustain pedal) After a few seconds, the bass note was terminated, which is silly. It should have terminated an older voice that was being used for the right hand repetitions, because that would be FAR less noticable.

IF I am right, then IMHO if you set the voice limit very high, you may find that you can easily reach that limit, and start to stress your disk ("slow disk warnings"). Don't assume that just because you can reach a certain voice limit, that you NEED that voice limit (or even more). Rather, start off low, and gradually increase the limit until you feel that you've reached the point of diminishing returns. I.e - if you can't notice any increase in fullness of sound, and you are not noticing any dropped notes, then you may have reached the point of diminishing returns, and further increases are just a waste. Obviously, if you can't ever reach that point of diminishing returns, then you need to address that. (change settings, or a faster disk, etc)

I tried the Vintage D as well, and it DOES appear to have good voice management. (for example, repeating a note with the sustain pedal did not exceed a simultaneous voice count of 4 - very good sign! If I do this test using EWQLP, it just keeps using a new voice for every repeat, which is stupid)

Unfortunately the Ivory player doesn't actually seem to display a live voice count, which makes it a bit harder to know what is going on.

Also, if the American D does use lots of voices, that doesn't mean that all those lots of voices are wasteful/bad - most of it could be very worthwile. (e.g sympathetic resonance). All I'm saying is that the behaviour I observed for that repeating chord test is questionable.

Also refer to this recent account from Macy: Re: Synthogy Ivory - HDD or SSD?

Greg.

Thanks for that info, Greg. Quite interesting...and disappointing..

On the other hand, it sounded very good. ;^)

I didn't mean to sound overly negative - I mainly wanted to offer advice on a possible approach to setting a sensible voice limit, and to warn you that just because you may be able to reach a very high voice count in your playing, that doesn't necessarily mean that you need to set it that high.

Note that my EWQLP is quite usable, despite what I said about it's voice management. However, I notice that repeated notes with the sustain pedal can be muddy, due to too many voices. When I play my DP, I notice that the notes are more distinct.

Greg.

It does indeed sound amazing.

I don't know what a 'normal' setting for the limit would be, based on a solid PC system, but on some things I play on my Kawai I run out of notes with the 96 limit.

Given that it uses an iLok, you'd think/hope that they'd let you try it, and give you a refund if you can't get the performance you want. (i.e, by revoking the license from the iLok, if that's possible - not sure whether it is....)

Greg.

About 100 voices works perfectly fine for me using the American Concert D. I actually have it set at 128 voices now (64 sample buffer) with my Samsung 840 SSD, but that is a few more voices than necessary.

I do wanna get the Ivory American D soon. I was debating and thought since I have a 2 Steinway samples that I should go for the Bosendorfer and Baby grand from Galaxy to get variety. So I bought those 2 downloads over the weekend.

As for American D - is the tone consistent through the octaves? Does it have a lot of dynamic range like the galaxy suite ? I'm really spoiled by Galaxy Steinway and Vintage D and wondered if American D is on the same level. And what does it do for me sound wise that my Vintage D doesn't ?? more Pop like or ?? really hard to judge of Try-sound.

I guess I'm realizing I'm a Steinway guy and well of course i have always like most every Yamaha I've played.

I tried to judge the sound and looks of the playability by watching this vid, not sure if you've seen it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWnbja5UXm8&sns=tw

IMO, it's almost too consistent from top to bottom octaves. It's very clean, but compared to the Vintage D it doesn't pick up enough weight in the lower octaves, and lacks the timbre dynamic range and attack of the Vintage D at higher velocities. I believe it is less suitable for Pop or Jazz than the Vintage D, which to me is virtually perfect in that respect. More appropriate for classical I guess (which I don't play).

that kind of sounds like Galaxy Steinway - it's more even in tone to me, but not as dynamic as vintage D - but I really like them both. Kind of they way I think the P-155 piano compares to my P-250 - the P-250 had much more bite at high velocities.

How about American D compared to Ivory German D - better ? I think you said you had that too.