(...) it’s super deeply sampled, with 100+ dynamic layers, and it’s a pristine instrument in a beautiful hall with top of the line microphones. I don’t think that can honestly be called badly sampled. The truth is that it has no competition at all in the sampling world, because strange as it sounds not a single producer has deeply sampled a new, or at least fairly new Steinway D. Walker is (and totally sounds like) a vintage instrument, Noire is a niche library, Ravenscroft is no steinway and not too deep either. Garritan CFX is amazing, but has no “reedy” Steinway tone.
With the VSL pianos you get many mics, including tree,which is crazy that almost no other libraries has. (...)
Much-much-much more important than
how much you sample, Pianolando, is
what you sample. The Synchrons were captured from 10 different mic perspectives, but there’s not a single one among them that can make these instruments sing. Synchrons can’t sing. They can yap, they can quack, they can do a damn fine impersonation of a desinfected refrigerator, they can bark, growl and roar and their sound can pierce through armour, but they can’t sing. Isn’t that sad?
The Hammersmith is another example: countless velocity layers, but resulting in a piano that is frustratingly impotent at either side of the dynamic spectrum. Or take the Spitfire Studio Series: 6 microphone pairs half of which I find only useful — especially when considering the room these things were recorded in — to beef up the specs or waste disc space.
I’ve got drum libraries that have only 4 velocity layers and just one mic perspective but which are capable of more convincing and appealing sounding drum performances than some super-deluxe libraries that come with endless mic perspectives, various bleed channels and I don’t know how many velocity layers.
What does it matter if a piano has 100 velocity layers if all hundred of them were captured with the same flawed mic set-ups that resulted in that thin, cold and hard Synchron sound? These pianos might have had 2000 velocity layers and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference as to the unpleasant character of their sound.
People shouldn’t be so quick to be in awe of impressive specs or to belief that impressive specs also automatically result in impressive libraries. That’s anything but a given. In fact, it is very rarely the case. Specs, on their own, mean absolutely nothing. ‘Deeply sampled’ is totally meaningless too, unless sounds were sampled that are sonically solid and musically meaningful, believable and expressive. And I fear I hear way too few samples in my two Synchron pianos that fit that description.
I never read specs, I’m not in the least interested in them. Because I’ve got too much proof on my sample HD’s of the fact that these numbers are in no way related to the actual musical quality of a library.
_