re-peat
Senior Member
I have the full version of the D-274 and I can’t say I enjoy playing or listening to it very much. I bought it without expecting much — none of the demos really convinced me and the Synchron CFX (standard version) which I have, isn’t exactly one of my best purchases either — but I did need something that can sort of suggest a Steinway-ish piano in a classical concert situation and there being nothing much available, I gave in to the Black Friday offer.
The thing sounds very rompler-like to me, I must say. It’s much better of course than even the best rompler piano, but there’s something in the sound that instantly makes me think of a hardware piano module rather than a real instrument. That processed/desinfected/optimized PCM-samples-sound, you know. Again, it’s better than that, but there’s enough of that in it to distract me everytime I play or listen to this library.
And it requires a lot of tweaking to get rid of that ‘bakelite’ timbre (hard and cold) which is the default timbre of this piano (an unpleasantness it shares with the CFX).
Strangely enough though, despite that hard sound, the piano sounds very poorly defined in a mix. Diffused, almost. As if it’s filtered out in the middle. This is something than can be addressed to some extent with EQ’ing, but isn’t it sad that you first have to EQ the high end quite drastically to give the piano some roundness of tone, and that you then also have to EQ the mids quite heavily in order to give the instrument the necessary presence in a mix? A well-sampled instrument shouldn’t require nowhere near this amount of EQ’ing, in my view.
Luckily, the software is mostly excellent, allowing for individual notes to be edited (if that hadn’t been possible, I think I would have already deleted this library from my HD), good use of the wealth of microphone perspectives goes a long way in masking some of the less appealing characteristics of this piano and, eventually, I did manage to end up with something that doesn’t make me wince too often playing or listening to it.
But if I had to give points: 3 out of 10.
_
The thing sounds very rompler-like to me, I must say. It’s much better of course than even the best rompler piano, but there’s something in the sound that instantly makes me think of a hardware piano module rather than a real instrument. That processed/desinfected/optimized PCM-samples-sound, you know. Again, it’s better than that, but there’s enough of that in it to distract me everytime I play or listen to this library.
And it requires a lot of tweaking to get rid of that ‘bakelite’ timbre (hard and cold) which is the default timbre of this piano (an unpleasantness it shares with the CFX).
Strangely enough though, despite that hard sound, the piano sounds very poorly defined in a mix. Diffused, almost. As if it’s filtered out in the middle. This is something than can be addressed to some extent with EQ’ing, but isn’t it sad that you first have to EQ the high end quite drastically to give the piano some roundness of tone, and that you then also have to EQ the mids quite heavily in order to give the instrument the necessary presence in a mix? A well-sampled instrument shouldn’t require nowhere near this amount of EQ’ing, in my view.
Luckily, the software is mostly excellent, allowing for individual notes to be edited (if that hadn’t been possible, I think I would have already deleted this library from my HD), good use of the wealth of microphone perspectives goes a long way in masking some of the less appealing characteristics of this piano and, eventually, I did manage to end up with something that doesn’t make me wince too often playing or listening to it.
But if I had to give points: 3 out of 10.
_