Great to see you here too Casey! Looking forward to the Pulse or Wave when they land.

Pulse has landed.  We're shipping about 20+ per day and will ramp production up over the course of this week and next. 

Geek Wave is coming along nicely as well. Working on getting an update with pictures and a detailed progress report ASAP

In my opinion Steinways do sound distinctly different from other pianos, if we're talking grand pianos that is.
There's some piano emulation software that is pretty amazing. http://www.synthogy.com/products/ivorygrand.html

I remember liking Boesendorfer also.

I always love to see good in-depth objective measurements and feedbacks.

Thank you so much.

Few more information would like to share here.

FRM and TCM are not only DF difference, as you could see in FFT. Even order HD vs Odd ratio is different too. Anti-aliasing filter can not do that.

And TIM/IMD/SPTE are all different too. When I design these 'digital mode', I try to combine different techs into one mode to shape the sound I like.  In Da Vinci DAC, I even skip all digital filter in NOS mode and apply Bessel analog filters and analog interpolation to make 44.1k CD music sounds at its best. The measurement result of that is not the best, but sounds right to me.

Again, very impressed for your detail measurement. Thank you!

Larry

In my opinion Steinways do sound distinctly different from other pianos, if we're talking grand pianos that is.
There's some piano emulation software that is pretty amazing. http://www.synthogy.com/products/ivorygrand.html

I remember liking Boesendorfer also.

In the US most people only know Steinway as the being the top brand, they do a LOT with marketing, that's not to knock their quality but their marketing efforts does push other worthy brands out of the public's eye.  The New York Steinway sound is also a bit brighter and more aggressive than the Hamburg Steinway sound, well, in general it is more aggressive than many European brands.  There are some great European brands like Bosendorfer, there is C. Bechstein, Bluthner, and one of my favs is the Fazioli which is not known that well.  All are quite pricey.  From japan Kawai's Shigeru brand is highly regarded, and some of Yamahas models are quite good.  Sviatoslav Richter was a Yamaha artist and he is arguably the greatest pianist of the 20th century.  But most Yamaha pianos are not highly regarded.

I once went to a music trade show about 8 years ago in Shanghai, it's the largest trade show of musical instruments in the world and all the big piano names were there, you go to the Bluthner booth and some guy with the last name of Bluthner is working it!  The founder of Fazioli was there showing off his 10 ft grand and shorter models.  Of course the acoustics were horrible, you can't really get any sense of what each piano sounded like, I'm sure it's not all that different than the audio trade shows where you can't really get an honest audition with so-and-so headphone, etc etc.

We are going a bit off topic here but Richter actually played for several years with Bosendorfer imperial (his Bach recordings are on B.I), he later moved to Yamaha for commercial reasons. Yamaha actually owns Bosendorfer..

Bosendorfer was Liszt's fav piano! He had a Steinway too (gift of the company) which was played by Italian pianist Michele Campanella in recent years (you can find his work on Philips LPs).

As for a great recording with Bosendorfer I would suggest Paul Badura Skoda in Valois LPs

Fazioli makes amazing instruments, I heard them on a number of occasions including a series of concerts by Angela Hewitt (who plays exclusively on the Italian pianos).

And going back to the subject, piano sound is one thing my Geek Out (1000) cannot reproduce in a convincing way, especially for the lack of harmonic vibrations coming from the gran codas. No faithful decay in long notes if you know what I mean.

Oh that is interesting, I did not know that about using Yamaha for commercial reasons, do you know if there is a story behind this?

And back to the subject (slightly), what dacs do you feel perform very well specifically in the reproduction of piano?