hi everyone i'm a brand new Synchron piano user and this is my first post.

First of all i'm not a musician by any stretch of the imagination, playing Piano is just something that i enjoy doing when i have free time, and the best acoustic piano i've ever played was a public Yamaha babygrand so take everything i'm going to say with a grain of salt. (also i've never heard a Steinway in person, only through videos and audio recordings)

But that being said i've been trying the Synchron Steinway D-274 for about 2 days know and my only issue with it is the sharpness/harshness of the mid to high register, when playing softly it doesn't seem to be present but not even playing in ff just playing in f or right below that it becomes really brittle/pingy it starts having this metallic quality that is really unpleasant to my ear, i should also mention that i'm going after a player perspective so i'm using either the condenser or ribbon with a little bit of room mic for color, when soloing the mid 1 mic for example that harshness is almost completely gone so i assume it has to do with the condenser/ribbon/tube being very close to the hammers.

Now to what i tried doing to fix it, 

First thing that seem to get rid of that is reducing the midi sensitivity to -15 to -20 but the issue with that is that it's not fixing the problem but hiding it because when looking at the very useful velocity curve what it's doing is just making it harder to get to the f and ff range which get's rid of that harshness because it's like you're playing softer, and i like to be in the ff register when really digging in so the midi sensitivity isn't a solution for me

Second thing that is the Obvious solution here is EQ, now thanks to some EQ on the Condenser mic i've managed to get rid of that metallic cold harshness by adding a high shelf cut of the highs starting around 3.25k with -10db, to my ear it also gets rid of some presence which i don't like but i can live with, but i don't know if i'm going about this the absolute best way, i guess using the 4th band with a peak EQ cut on the right frequency would be better but my ear is not good enough to find that frequency, which is why i'm writing this to all the much more experienced people on this forum.

what are your methods for making the Steinway sample sound less cold and metallic when played close to the f to ff range, how do you make it more warm and mellow without sacrifing too much presence, i remember seing a video of guy that had EQued the hammer hit frequency from each key individually but i can't find that video again..

also it would be probably helpful for me to show you the kind of sound i'm working towards for your suggestions to be easier, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyBqq_Ibdvg&ab_channel=AnimenzPianoSheets

if you skip to minute 1:30  you can hear how even when he digs into the keys it never sounds cold/metallic, i'm also curious to know what mic combination would be the best to achive a similar sound.

Anyway sorry for the long post, and thank you for any suggestions you may have !

I use all of them. 2200 voices is quite a lot, going over 1700 is more like a stress test than anything else. But my SSD is only delivering 625 MB/s, that might be the bottleneck in my case, since my CPU load hardly ever goes beyond 60%.

I would say yes. In the end, is a matter of a balance between latency and at which number of voices you start to hear cracks & pops. I have a 11900KF and in my latest setup my cracks & pops start at 1700 voices with 512 buffer and at 2200-2400 voices with a 1024 buffer (higher latency),

I would suggest also going for 32 GB RAM.

Originally Posted by: Boy

Hi, I got  D274 full version, but it will start sound cracking if I use more than 3 mics. My CPU is I7-4790K,  16GB ddr3 ram, SSD is Kingston A400  (500MB/S read, 450MB/s write). Do you guy know what is the cause of cracking sound issue? Is my CPU too weak or just the ram not enough?

Hi there!

This CPU is quite old, so I would highly recommend to upgrade it to a recent one.
Modern CPUs no longer support DDR3, so you would also have to upgrade to DDR4 or DDR5. I would recommend to get at least 32GB when working with virtual instruments.

Of course, I can't guarantee that this will solve your performance problem since there are also other factors to consider, like your audio interface and the drivers.

Best, Ben