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Comment by throwaway1777 | Hacker News Reader

The timbre of piano strings is an interesting subject, but to my ear honestly the sound isn’t that much different in this example.

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For what it’s worth I’ve got a trained ear (trained musician, brief career as a mastering engineer) and the bass notes on these recordings sound freakishly distinct in pitch (identifiable, “tight”, “not boomy”).

It’s similar to the difference between an electric bass guitar and an acoustic bass.

Or more to the point, it’s one notch further in bass note clarity on a scale from small upright piano to baby grand piano to concert grand piano… to the Alexander piano.

I expect that a Fourier analysis of bass notes struck in isolation comparing piano types would reveal increasing proportions of fundamental to side frequencies, with the Alexander having the highest ratio.

Yes. I've looked at what a 1.80 grand puts out in the lows and it is really quite muddy from a spectral perspective. You can still tell the pitches apart but there is a lot of smearing and the harmonics are, especially when you look at the high end, all over the place.

Subjectively to me the low notes sound almost fake, like a default GarageBand piano sound. Or like the thin, metallic notes of a harpsichord.

Yes, you've got it! That's a great take!

That quality, though it may seem a bit unreal, has benefits in terms of revealing musical gestures that would otherwise be obscured. (See my link to the Mussorgsky passage elsethread.)

Speaking as an audio engineer, we are always fighting to achieve this kind of transparency.

I have found that there are many aspects and dimensions to listening.

For instance, I am now comfortable hearing very subtle nuance in musical performance, in particular piano performance. Meanwhile, my dad is an audiophile and not musically trained but can hear a whole world of detail when assessing sound scrapes and equalisation. I brought him along to help me choose a digital piano and was humbled by how many things he could hear that were inaudible to me.

A friend of a friend was studying audio engineering and he recorded me playing the piano for a some coursework and the things he was focused on like acoustics, colour, fidelity and things like the very subtle hiss again were very different things I am used to listening out for.

Podcasters will talk about the BBC sound as being the gold standard and while I can tell good from bad I can't internalise what makes a broadcast have a good or bad sound....

Meanwhile back to topic, I've gone piano shopping with professional pianists and they can hear so much more than I can. I love watching videos by this channel on the subject: https://youtube.com/@RobertsPianos

I'm not an expert, but it might be that your speakers do not really respond to the low A (~27Hz). Check the speaker's response curve.

Reminds me of a saying in jazz circles

"Listening to brass through a recording is like photocopying a steak and eating the copy"

Some accoustic properties just can't be properly captured through microphones that aren't perfectly selected and reproduced through speakers engineered for the specific recording

This is true especially for the low end (without prohibitively expensive 18"+ drivers and a near flawless accoustic environment to minimise standing waves and any other issues etc)

That's a hilarious quote.

If you don't know what to expect then you probably should hear it side-by-side with a regular piano to pick up on the differences, that's much easier than to hear it being played because the effect is subtle enough that if you're not paying attention you will likely just think 'nice bass' and leave it at that.

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