As part of a listening session today, I put together a playlist to compare piano recordings. I decided that an interesting way to do this was to use the same piece of music, recorded by different artists on different instruments in different rooms by different engineers using different microphone and techniques. The only constant was the notes on the page in front of the performer.

A link to the playlist is here: LINK TO TIDAL

Playing through this, it’s interesting to pay attention to things like:

• Overall level of the recording
  • Notice how much (typically) quieter the Dolby Atmos-encoded recording is than the 2.0 PCM encoded ones. However, there’s a large variation amongst the 2.0 recordings.
• Monophonic vs. stereo recordings
• Perceived width of the piano
• Perceived width of the room
• How enveloping the room is (this might be different from the perceived width, but these two attributes can be co-related, possibly even correlated)
• Perceived distance to the piano.
  • On some of the recordings, the piano appears to be close. The attack of each note is quite fast, and there is not much reveberation.
  • On some of the recordings, the piano appears to be distant – more reveberant, with a soft, slow attack on each note.
  • On other recordings, it may appear that the piano is both near (because of the fast attack on each hammer-to-string strike) and far (because of the reverberation). (Probably achieved by using a combination of microphones at different distances – or using digital reverb…)
• The length of the reverberation time
• Whether the piano is presented as one instrument or a collection of strings (e.g. can you hear different directions to (or locations of) individual notes?)
• If the piano is presented as a wide source with separation between bass and treble, is the presentation from the pianist’s perspective (bass on the left, treble on the right) or the audience’s perspective (bass on the left, treble on the right… sort of…)