tough sounds to reproduce ???

brass blatt

Nil...huh?
I have my Steinway B positioned between and a few feet behind my Parsifal Encores. I hear GREAT piano upper octaves from my EMC-1 MkII/AlephP/Aleph2s?Encore system.
It's the LOWER octaves that aren't the same!
A grand piano's upper octaves DON"T have "body and weight".
Quite the contrary. They're thin, short, and basically excite only a small portion of the soundboard.
The bass strings excite the entire soundboard, and thus launch a HUGE pressurewave into the room which no reasonable number of speaker transducers can replicate.
Although I enjoy full-scale piano recordings on my system
(Nojima's Liszt on RefRec comes to mind as a great one), it's not the same as sitting down and exciting a giant diaphragm when I stretch out on those big Brahms chords.
Additionally, the top octaves' propagation toward the player or listener is VERY variable as a function of listening position, head angle, lid geometry, etc.
The ONLY way my B sounds right in the upper octaves to me WHWEN PLAYING it in my room is when the lid is fully shut, but the front door is wide open, yielding a constant depth
full-width "window" or port, if you will.
Sorry to belabor this, but getting a great system to do piano top octaves is not that hard. Voicing the damned piano is MUCH harder! Cheers.

Why didn't anyone mention violins in a symphonic orchestra. When many of these are playing together I find this the most difficult to reproduce. I always listen to violins when auditioning new equipment and it quickly gives me a sense of how good the product is.

Subaruguru, I guess I need to listen live piano more often to confirm what you are saying about the upper registers. May be I have to re-listen some very well recorded piano works (ref recordings/mapleshade). Thanks for your elaborate reply.

Subaruguru is right, but there's more to it. The reason the lower octaves are so difficult to reproduce is that when the piano is tuned properly by harmonics (more pianos are being tuned wrong now than ever--due to computerized tuning that doesn't take into account varying string lengths of different sized pianos) the lower notes excite strings of their harmonics. However, it is nearly impossible for a higher string to excite a lower note string because the mass of the lower string compared to the higher string is so great. There may be some excitement in this direct, but it's minimal. Those BIG Brahms chords were designed to have just this effect--and they sound great on a Steinway B. I have one as well--it's a dream to play and to listen to--and Subaruguru you can get those high notes voiced properly. Contact me if you like, I know some people that can work wonders on the older Steinways. Now, having said that--I can still reproduce a piano better than an Ocean. If you stop and think about the power of the sound of the ocean and the dynamics. You can speak to someone comfortably at a 2 to 5 foot distance. Get more than 20 feet away and you have to yell to overcome the sound of the ocean. It's an incredibly powerful sound--yet soothing at the same time. It has a side with greater sonic power, but it seems nearly omni-directional. It's easy to pick apart the areas of a piano that are not well reproduced, because we are familiar with it as sound and as music that we regularly reproduce--but that's not true of natural sounds--like the thunder mentioned. The next time you're at the ocean take a little time to indulge in the sound--you may think you've heard it reproduced before, but once you realize the vastness and power of the sound--you will see it really can't be reproduced. So, without any disrespect, I would very much like to know the system and recording that Nilthepill has been able to get an Ocean faithfully reproduced on. I will buy the recording tomorrow, and hopefully find a system to do it justice--I'm actually excited about trying this, because I've been trying to get something to reproduce the ocean for some time with no luck at all.