[sdiy] MIDI isn't musical : Flame bait?

[Glen]

At 09:35 PM 1/13/02 , harry wrote:

>Diss MIDI all you want... but stop referring to Casio as the
>"cheap spread".  I once did a single blind listening test between
>the Prophet V and a Casio MT-68

I've been in a piano showroom that had a wide selection of various acoustic and
digital pianos. I went through the various digital pianos and compared them to
the Steinway grand across the room, based on which one came the closest to the
acoustic Steinway's timbre. I also compared them to some of the "lesser"
acoustic pianos, just to be fair. I eventually picked one of the digital pianos
as being the closest to an acoustic piano.

A little later that day, I watched various people trying out the various
digital pianos. Out of several different customers, not one of them picked the
same piano I did. In fact, many of the people commented on the "poor sound" of
the piano I had picked earlier. These people didn't even pick pianos that were
close rivals to my personal favorite. In fact, many of the piano emulations
they liked best were plain horrible simulations of the acoustic pianos across
the room.

I should add that no one had actually bothered to try the "real" pianos across
the room, and do a direct comparison between them and the digital pianos (no
one except me, of course). These people were all picking out a digital piano
either on their memory of what a piano sounds like, or perhaps on the notion of
what a piano *should* sound like (but actually doesn't).

When trying to emulate one instrument with another, I realized that even if you
succeeded in making a perfect imitation of the first instrument's sound, there
would be several people that *still* wouldn't like it. In fact, they would
insist that your simulation was a poor one. In reality, their reference isn't
the original instrument, but some sort of flawed personal conception of
reality.


Later,
Glen