The Sound Board

Stumbled upon this piano. Anyone using this already? I've known about this studio long ago producing mixing plugins. I guess this is their first VI. There is also a lite version for a reduced price.

The Ravenscroft 220 VI is one of the worlds most deeply sampled and realistic sounding piano sample libraries. Two fully sampled sound characteristics, based on vintage Neve 31102 and modern AMS Neve 1081R microphone preamps. Six microphone positions to mix your favorite piano sound. Play it like a real grand piano by enjoying sustain pedal samples, una corda samples, differently sustaining release samples, Maestoso sustain pedal functionality, harmonic resonances, action and pedal sounds, as well as staccato string sounds.

https://www.primestudio.at/en/plugins/rav-220

Listen to the demos here:

https://www.primestudio.at/en/virtual-i ... nts-listen

Mmm. Interesting. But not an instant or obvious purchase based on the material I Iistened to. There’s a kind of glassy clangy-ness (or clangy glassiness) in many of the demos (at least in the ones I picked, randomly) and that’s not a piano sound I like very much. There are also quite a few presets among the ones demoed that sound *very* filtered to my ears. Don’t like that either. And yet, in other fragments, the instrument suddenly sounds really quite nice and uniquely impressive.

Something else however that stops me from immediately searching for the purchase button, is the excessively wide — artificially wide even, I would say — stereo image in several of the demos. (Unfortunately for the developer, the first three demos I clicked on, all exhibited it.) A strange, panoramically expansive image that sounds very unnatural to me. Especially noticeable when listening to my speakers; when I use headphones, it’s better.
But again, in other demos, the stereo image sounds perfectly natural, also on the speakers. So I don’t really know what we’re dealing with here. If it’s merely Kontakt processing, then I don’t mind (provided it can be disabled), if it is related to the actual recording however, I would find it quite a serious problem.

I also couldn’t help noticing that this Ravenscroft sounds NOTHING like the VLabs Ravenscroft. Okay, they’re both different models — a 220 and a 275 — but you’d think there would at least be a few shared characteristics in the piano sound, wouldn’t you? I can’t hear any, I must say, these sound like two totally different instruments/brands to me.

I’m definitely not buying today. Maybe later. It would help to hear a demo that simply walks us through the 6 microphones perspectives and presents these without anything else added (or subtracted).

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Very little available online about this 200 VI so far. Not sure if I'm willing to take the plunge without hearing some new demos (and feedback) from people who have purchased.