What sort of room acoustic are you placing the Steinway D in? For an instrument of that quality and size, you would normally consider omni condensers or possibly ribbons in order to capture the bottom octave. A restricted acoustic could scupper that plan.

Indeed - a recent project involved a wonderful piano and decent pianist in Boston, USA and the singer in the UK. The nice piano was in a very unflattering room. In the end, she recorded the piece and sent me the MIDI file and I stuck it in a Steinway VSTi, and it sounded far more realistic than her real one.

Near me here we have a guy who buys old pianos, restores them and sells them, and he's taken pianos from many people's homes where they sound quite unpleasant, and with very little restoration apart from the external appearance, sold them to venues with good acoustics.

Boswell, post: 465639, member: 29034 wrote: What sort of room acoustic are you placing the Steinway D in? For an instrument of that quality and size, you would normally consider omni condensers or possibly ribbons in order to capture the bottom octave. A restricted acoustic could scupper that plan.

Roughly 16x30

How high?

9'

Boswell, post: 465643, member: 29034 wrote: How high?

Oh 9' and the piano is positioned parallel to the short end at the far side

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what does the room sound like when you play piano music on decent kit in that room?

paulears, post: 465648, member: 47782 wrote: what does the room sound like when you play piano music on decent kit in that room?

Right now, playing on a 6' Grand it sounds fine. Quiet ambient, without being raucous. The concert grand comes in October, so I don't have a read on that yet.

Performers can rarely tell what a recording will sound like. It's not a criticism - they are simply too close to the action.

Are you planning to put the Steinway D in the same place as the 6' now is? I worry about reflections off the rear wall, despite the lid directing the sound down the room.

Boswell, post: 465650, member: 29034 wrote: Performers can rarely tell what a recording will sound like. It's not a criticism - they are simply too close to the action.

Are you planning to put the Steinway D in the same place as the 6' now is? I worry about reflections off the rear wall, despite the lid directing the sound down the room.

That has been the plan, in part due to filming considerations. FWIW I have windows and screen doors on the far end that can be kept open or partially open to reduce some of the reflection. I have tried that before and fortunately have not experienced ambient sound being picked up from the outside.

Warren Peterson, post: 465651, member: 52073 wrote: That has been the plan, in part due to filming considerations. FWIW I have windows and screen doors on the far end that can be kept open or partially open to reduce some of the reflection. I have tried that before and fortunately have not experienced ambient sound being picked up from the outside.

You may want to consider a theater curtian and/or some gobos to handle some of those reflections if you can't locate the piano in an optimum spot in the room.

I've decided on keeping the 4099' s inside the piano with another matched pair of R84 as a bit off the strings. I have a couple of PCC160s mounted at the top of the wall in the back, so we'll see how all this goes. I also have mobile backdrop/curtain mounts with different backdrops in case I need to do additional baffling.