Tue Nov 05, 2013 2:22 pm
If you play regularly on a real piano you will hear a big difference regardless of what sample set you use, whether it's modelled or sampled: if organ pipes affected each other as much as piano strings, and if the organ case had as much effect on the sound as the piano case, and if dynamics had as much impact on the sound as they do on a piano I think we would be not as satisfied by organ samples as we are now.
This said as things now it would be computationally prohibitive to have a "modelled" full organ as modelling the air inside a pipe is a lot more complicated than modelling a string oscillating, not to mention that there are only a few hundred strings inside a piano, while there can be thousands inside an organ.
There is also the fact that most people will not go to a great expense to hear a piano concert played on a specific individual piano in a specific concert hall, they might say they have a preference for a 'Steinway' kind of sound, or a 'Bosendorfer' kind of sound, but in the end depending on the "preparation" done to the hammers, the exact tuning used by the tuner and so on, the same piano could sound quite different on a day-to-day basis.
From my perspective given all the factors that can contribute to the "piano sound" vs the "organ sound" you can get a lot closer to the "real" thing sampling an organ and modelling a piano: as time goes on and computers become more and more powerful this might change, the issue is also that unlike in the past decades there is not as much push for computers to evolve.
Most computers nowadays are "good enough" for what the average user wants to do, so there is definitely not as much of a push towards, say, allowing computers to have 1TB of RAM. Nowadays most computers support up to 32 gigabytes, but the vast majority of people will have no more than 4 or maybe 8, in years past if your computer supported 4 megabytes you tended to have 4 megabytes, because there was a big difference in the user experience with the extra RAM. Now if you have windows taking up say a gig, your browser and word processor taking up 2 or 3, if you add another 16 or 32 it's not going to be that useful.
For pianos, though, I could definitely see having a 1TB sample on a fast SSD, after all with a sub-1ms access time it should be possible to have a completely-streamed-from-disk piano, and with 1TB of samples it could be made a lot more realistic (you could easily have 1000-2000 samples of every note and round-robin to your heart's content).
Anyways this is definitely going off topic, but I still think the OP should give pianoteq a try, given that it's so small to download and a demo is available there is no reason not to do so.
Found a dealer who sells it for $120 USD (download version) and the iLok2 dongle for $45. 3 separate pianos (American Grand, Italian Grand, and German Grand) can be bought in a "bundle" for approx $300+ (plus of course the iLok2 unless you already have one). The iLok2 is a USB smart key that holds licenses for participating protected software products. A single iLok can store over 500 separate licenses (2nd Generation). From the demos I've heard, this piano should do the job. To my ears, there is considerable differences between modeling pianoteq and sampling. VILabs TrueKeys.
But wow, to be able to practice even scales and simple songs on a Steinway.