24/352.8 vs. 16/44.1 - an attempt at a comparison

[bluesman]

18 hours ago, fas42 said:

Basically, for my setup, the tonality matched better how I thought a piano should sound.

 

...and there's the trigger for overcoming my reluctance to contribute to threads like this. And although the piano was the instrument in question here, this applies to every recorded instrument you hear. Yes, I know that there was a study showing that professional musicians couldn't reliably tell a Stradivarius from a high quality new violin.  But the problem is the same for all - if you don't know what was recorded, you can't possibly judge subtleties in the accuracy of reproduction.

 

You simply can not know how that or any other recorded piano "should" sound unless you know what it is.  In fact, many differences in "sound quality" among equivalent pianos from Baldwin, Steinway, Bechstein, Bösendorfer, Steingraeber, Blüthner, Yamaha, Fazioli, Shigeru Kawai etc are more easily heard than are the differences among similar electronics, cables, power supplies etc that fuel the flames of AS.  No piano at that level is objectively and measurably "better" in any way, but each has its own sound and feel...and its own devotees.

 

Why do they sound different?  Start with the scale length, gauge, construction and tension of the strings for the same size piano. Then there's the group of materials from which the frame & sounding board are made. Throw in the way the strings are anchored to the board, held in tune, and supported at the ends of their scale length (the equivalents of the "nut" and "bridge" on a guitar).  Then stick the whole thing into a case whose shape, size, construction, material, etc vary from brand to brand and model to model.  Most concert stages have 9' grands.  Most studio recordings of any quality are made on pianos of over 6', and most clubs at which live recordings are made have pianos of at least 5'10".  But any of them might be from any of the above makers, and you simply do not know which is which unless they tell you or you're experienced enough to hazard an educated guess.

 

Pianos are not even tuned the same way, and this greatly affects how they sound. Google "temperament" to learn about the many tunings that can be used. The 12 note chromatic scale used in western music is not divisible into perfect intervals, so tuning a piano to a perfect C major scale will leave it slightly out of tune in any other key. "Tempering" the scale means detuning it a bit to achieve the best compromise across all 11 scales. Many temperaments have been developed and used since Pythagoras defined the system on which most western music is based. Most pianos today are tuned with either "equal" temperament or "well" temperament, but who tunes it, how, and how well will clearly affect how it sounds.  You (like pianists, conductors, recording engineers, etc) may prefer the sound of one temperament to another, but most of you were probably unaware of this.  Tuning and temperament can also affect the effects of various distortions in the recording / playback chain on the SQ you hear and how you perceive it.

 

Joey Calderazzo (a great jazz pianist, for those who don't know who he is) prefers Blüthner pianos for their warm midrange and a tight lower register that doesn't make a muddy mix with the bass player. He and many other pros avoid Steinways when they can.  Angela Hewitt finds Steinways to be "unsubtle" - she plays and endorses Fazioli because "[t]he action is incredibly responsive to every variation in touch, and everything I imagine in my head I can produce with my fingers. It gives me complete freedom to play as I wish. The sound is also very coloured. With the Fazioli you can get great power but also wonderful delicacy which, nevertheless, does not lose its brilliance. The high frequencies and reverberations are always there. This is a great feeling! It has wonderful clarity, especially in the lower register".  Her summation of the SQ is worth repeating: "The sound is also very coloured".  They all are, in many ways.  And to make the issue even more confusing, Wolf Trap recently switched to Steinway after decades of using Yamahas!

 

The Estonia L274 is a very bright concert grand known for its touch sensitivity, making it highly prized for those who favor delicate melodic tone poems like Clair de Lune.  The Shiugeru Kawai SK-EX is a very powerful grand with a dark, full rich tone that responds well to big pieces like Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C#m played with a firm touch. The Yamaha CFX concert grand is legendary as a balanced piano with sensitive touch throughout a wide dynamic range.  It's felt by many who actually do know "how a piano should sound" to be the best concert grand in the world (if there really is such a thing as the best, which I personally doubt). And Oscar Peterson took his personal Bösendorfer 290 concert grand around the world after discovering it while playing a concert in Vienna in the early 1970s - he wouldn't play anything else once he found his B.

 

So PLEASE stop thinking that you know how a piano "should" sound and trying to judge the accuracy of reproduced music by that criterion unless you know enough specifics about the piano (or other instrument, vocalist etc) you're hearing to do so.  You may know how you like it to sound - but that's totally irrelevant to the accuracy of reproduction.

[bluesman]

FWIW, Hoff is playing a Steinway D, which is their flagship concert grand.  It's a wonderful piano for "general purpose playing", and I wouldn't kick it off my stage 😎  But I do prefer the slightly fuller, richer sound (at least to my ears) of the big Yamaha.  I had the same preference in a standard size grand when I bought mine back in 1981, so I have a Yamaha at home a well.

 

The YouTube video of this track is very instructive - it shows mic placement, which explains a lot.  When listening to a solo piano in concert, you don't hear any consistent spatial placement of the registers of the instrument.  When I first listened to the two files at the heart of this thread, I noted strangely consistent placement of different registers between the speakers.  The middle octaves emerge largely from left of center in this recording, while lower and higher octaves often peek out from the right as well as all around.  There's no consistency between the ends of the keyboard and the corresponding speakers, but there is consistent placement of fundamentals around 250-500 Hz.  Before I searched the posts to find out what the song was and who was playing it, I began to wonder if it was a 2 piano piece in a few spots because notes in the same octave seemed to be coming from two distinct places at once. I think that third mic at the far end of the sound board may be the reason for this.

 

There's also more reflected, delayed sound than I like - my living room is not a cathedral.  To my ears, there's a lot more of this "sonic congestion" at places like 3:20 in 005 than there is in 004.  I have no idea how this relates to the processing being compared in this thread, but that reverberation does not seem so prominent in the YouTube audio.  Perhaps there's some technical explanation in the various analyses in this thread.

 

I also assume (and hope) that the powered monitor facing Hoff was not live during recording.  If it was, it had to be contributing to the heavy dose of "ambience".

[bluesman]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

 

The mistake you're making here is implying that 'normal' people can't distinguish live sounds from that of normal audio reproduction rigs - no-one has to know what type of piano, they just have to nail the fact that the sound is coming from speakers, rather than a live instrument.

 

That may be true if the goal is simply generating audio output that sounds "real".  But it's total nonsense when discussing accuracy in reproduction, which seems to me to be what the OP was addressing. Sounding like one "thinks a piano should sound" is hardly a criterion for judging the quality and accuracy of any component of a playback system.  The OP seems to me to be focusing on whether any element of true fidelity to the source is lost in conversion from higher resolution to lower, to wit:

• "Could there be anything in the original 24/352.8 file that is lost during decimation down to 16/44.1? If so, what could have been lost, considering there’s virtually no music signal above 10kHz anyhow? Is all this hires malarkey really much ado about nothing?"

A mediocre recording of almost any "tack piano" (a piano with thumbtacks in the hammers to simulate old, worn felts) will sound a lot more "live" than a better recording of a poorly maintained Baldwin baby grand.  The tacks generate sharp transient attacks on the notes, and there's a lot more high frequency energy in the signal - it's simply more convincing when played back through almost any system.  The effect is useful in some kinds of music - I did it many times back in the '60s and '70s.  By your criterion, this is good sound. 

[bluesman]

13 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Which is implying that you believe that a microphone and recording system is incapable of capturing the sounds of a live instrument such as a piano.

 

I can not imagine how you concluded that from what I actually said.

 

13 minutes ago, fas42 said:

When did I say fake transient attacks on a note makes something more realistic? Or that pumped up treble makes the sound more lively?

 

You didn’t - I did, because it’s true (except that the transients aren’t fake, they’re real). Having done all this and more on my high speed Crown deck and listened through Infinity Reference Standards driven by a Hafler 500, a Citation 2 and a Marantz 8b, I know it’s correct.