Well, when listening to a recording, nobody is standing in front of a real piano with a live player heading what is coming off the instrument.
Consider what happens to a drum kit in the process of making commercial, high quality recording: drums do not sound remotely like that in person. Yet, except for some dudes in bands, society's perception of drums, having primarily consumed their sound through recordings, is that they are heavily processed. Standing in a front of a live drum kit, the sound is washy and shitty, with very little "punch" to it, and always way too loud.
That is why now all commercial pop/rock/urban recordings, even if the engineer/producer/artist wants to "do it right" with a live player, a plurality of the drum sound gets replaced with
samples. Maybe some Boomers out there trying to recreate the glory days say it doesn't sound better, but history, and its concomitant effect on societal
taste, is written by the winners.
Of course, "drums" are barely an instrument anyway.
Yet, the principles above apply to other instruments, the piano being easier on the difficulty-to-sample spectrum given the nature of the instrument.
To the guy who says he plays (played?) the Liszt Bminor Sonata (
), there was a sampled piano out there when I was young called Ivory II. It sounded pretty good, but was a bit of a hassle to make it sound "real." Ivory II still sounds pretty good, and it is still a hassle to make it sound real. That isn't remotely the same universe of difference between that synth thing you were speaking of and string samples today. But it what you said is confusing, you have played the Liszt B Minor on the VSL 280VC or you "just know" that it won't sound as good?