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OPEN LETTER TO SAMPLE SET PRODUCERS

Existing and forthcoming Hauptwerk instruments, recommendations, ...
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telemanr

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Re: OPEN LETTER TO SAMPLE SET PRODUCERS

PostTue Sep 19, 2017 6:39 pm

I can picture Bach upset with a bellows person failing to provide steady enough wind. All a matter of degrees. And I don't think builders were really trying to produce any real noticeable wind variation. It's not in builders and innovators interest to build something that does less than what it ideally could do with the right design.
Rob Enns
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adri

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Re: OPEN LETTER TO SAMPLE SET PRODUCERS

PostWed Sep 20, 2017 6:23 am

josq wrote:Hi Adri, I am genuinely interested, so thanks for your answer!

A few years ago, I was at a concert at the Hagerbeer organ in Leiden. This large organ was hand (foot)-pumped during the concert. This really seemed to have a subtle but beautiful "breathing" effect on the sound. I need no convincing... but I seek to increase my understanding.


Oh great, sorry I was confused and thought you were just a bit sarcastic. My bad. In my discussions above, people have reacted to the ways the CD recordings were made, but that was not my point at all; I really don't care how good/bad the CD sound quality is for my discussion here; it was the organs' breaths I was reacting to, and nothing, nothing else.

So, please accept my apologies.
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Eric Sagmuller

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Re: OPEN LETTER TO SAMPLE SET PRODUCERS

PostWed Sep 20, 2017 11:32 am

Mixtuur4st wrote:organsRgreat wrote:
In my opinion too few speaker channels (and wrong types of speakers – another big topic) have more to do with lack of realism than wind modeling.


Absolutely true, in my opinion.
I am experimenting with a 100-plus channel audiosystem and the first results are overwhelming.
It is the mixing of the individual pipes (samples) in the air instead of in an electronic device that drastically improves the experienced reality of a sampled organ.

To Adri: listening by headphones, no matter how good they are, will never let you hear that mixing in the air.
Unless, of course, you listen to a CD that recorded a real organ.

Have fun,
Jack


Finally, some others who feel the same way as I do about this. Nothing against HW, but it's just the nature of the beast and any VPO for that matter. In fact I rarely listen to Contrebombarde for that reason. But CD recording yes, no matter how badly they were butchered as someone suggested.

Eric
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adri

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Re: OPEN LETTER TO SAMPLE SET PRODUCERS

PostWed Sep 20, 2017 1:31 pm

[/quote]

Finally, some others who feel the same way as I do about this. Nothing against HW, but it's just the nature of the beast and any VPO for that matter. In fact I rarely listen to Contrebombarde for that reason. But CD recording yes, no matter how badly they were butchered as someone suggested.

Eric[/quote]

In defense of listening to Contrebombarde: whether or not I like the playing of pieces or the organs used, or the registrations used or tempos applied, or whatever, this place is an absolutely fantastic discovery zone !

:-)
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josq

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Re: OPEN LETTER TO SAMPLE SET PRODUCERS

PostWed Sep 20, 2017 3:02 pm

Concerning `mixing in the air´, large arrays of speakers versus stereo speakers, etc: I think this is a complicated topic, and I don't think I have yet reached a full understanding of it. Nevertheless, some remarks, and I am open for criticism and corrections.

I think it is crucial to define your aim. (1) Do you want to have sound of some historic organs faithfully reproduced? Or (2) is it your aim to build your own pipe organ using digital pipe samples instead of real pipes?

Case (1) applies to me (and Adri). In this case, some theoretical considerations make me feel inclined to advise against the use of large speaker arrays. Firstly, you'll need to match two situations. (I) if you listen to the real organ, standing at the recording position, you will hear some pipes from the right, other from the left, some higher, others lower in the organ case, etc. (II) Similarly, listening to a speaker array, you will hear some samples from the most left speakers, others from the right or near the center, etc. I estimate it will be extremely difficult to make an exact match between situations I and II. Too easily, a pipe sample will sound more (or less) to the right or left than in reality.

Moreover, I do not want to have any alterations, or, if some alterations are unavoidable, I want to have them corrected. Assuming samples are properly recorded, my audio chain should process thesamples without any alteration, to be translated into vibrations of my speaker cones. Again, to guarantee I will hear the same as the microphones recorded, the sound emanating from my speaker cones should reach my ears unaltered. From this perspective, having some "sound mixing in the air" or some influence of the acoustics of my room is undesirable, because there will be a lot of interferences that are not present at the recording position.

My understanding is therefore that in case (1) it is best to have headphones or a single pair of speakers. In this case, one major potential issue is harmonic and intermodular distortion occuring when sending many audio signals to a single speaker; another is phase problems when combining tweeters, midranges and subwoofers. Therefore, it will be rewarding to obtain a single pair of stereo speakers (and subwoofer and audio interface) of the very highest quality possible, instead of purchasing many cheaper speakers. Some people build their own speakers because they believe anything on the market is compromised.

However, in case (2), the situation is very different. In this case, you ideally want to have a single speaker for each sampled pipe - this being practically impossible in most cases you want to have as many speakers as possible, with the additional advantage of reducing harmonic and intermodular distortion - to achieve the "wall of sound" that a real pipe organ presents because the pipes are in so many different locations. You probably want to use dry samples and let them mix into the acoustics of the room, instead of having all kinds of "acoustics over acoustics" effects. You will need to intonate your samples.

In summary, if (1) you want to reproduce the sound of an existing pipe organ, a stereo set up including correction software/hardware will be preferable, giving an exact sound image while alterations of the original acoustics should be avoided. Else, if (2) you want to build your own organ based on digital pipe samples, a large speaker array will be preferable, generating a sound wall which will need to be optimized for your room acoustics.
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Re: OPEN LETTER TO SAMPLE SET PRODUCERS

PostWed Sep 20, 2017 4:19 pm

I would like to build a Hauptwerk organ in my acoustic as in case number 2 above rather than creating stereo images. Are there examples in the forum where this has been accomplished? What sample sets could be used? What routing would likely be successful? I have been successful with every aspect of Hauptwerk except the audio system. Computer, monitor, keyboards, pedal boards, interfaces, stop controls, expression, everything has been easy to set up but not audio. Stereo and surround samples introduce phase cancellations that are difficult to deal with and at best seem unnatural to my ears. I would like to challenge the sample set producers to produce at least a few mono sets that would facilitate putting a virtual organ in an existing acoustic.
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Re: OPEN LETTER TO SAMPLE SET PRODUCERS

PostThu Sep 21, 2017 2:41 am

A short reaction to josq, who doesn't want samples mixing in the air:
how do you think the sound of the pipes in a real pipe organ mix in the real world before reaching your ears ?

Enjoy,
Jack
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Re: OPEN LETTER TO SAMPLE SET PRODUCERS

PostThu Sep 21, 2017 3:34 am

I think the discussion may get confused if we focus on the difference between mixing in the air or mixing in the audio chain. In the end, in both cases it's just frequencies being summed before they reach your ear.

To me, the most relevant differences are the number of sound sources, their impact on the directionality of the sound, and the integration/correction of the acoustics of your listening room.

My evalution is that a speaker array (versus a single top-quality stereo speaker pair) would have a negative impact on the exact reproduction of the sound of an historic organ including its original acoustics, but a positive impact for anyone who wants to build an organ from digital pipe samples.

There are a lot of nuances here, and I didn't mention them all!
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Re: OPEN LETTER TO SAMPLE SET PRODUCERS

PostThu Sep 21, 2017 3:49 am

Hello Josq/Jack,

Josq is correct in that if the aim is accurate reproduction of the real 'wet' stereo-recorded organ (recorded from a single position), and if listening from a fixed position, then high-quality headphones, or a single pair or very high-quality near-field monitor speakers (within as acoustically-dry a listening room as possible, and positioned close to the listener, to minimise room interaction) are theoretically the best ways to achieve it. Any interaction with the listening room (including use of multiple speakers and associated 'mixing in the air') will make the result less true to the real recorded organ's acoustic, although some people prefer it anyway, depending on their aims and preferences (as josq wrote).

deftech wrote:I would like to build a Hauptwerk organ in my acoustic as in case number 2 above rather than creating stereo images. Are there examples in the forum where this has been accomplished? What sample sets could be used? What routing would likely be successful? I have been successful with every aspect of Hauptwerk except the audio system. Computer, monitor, keyboards, pedal boards, interfaces, stop controls, expression, everything has been easy to set up but not audio. Stereo and surround samples introduce phase cancellations that are difficult to deal with and at best seem unnatural to my ears. I would like to challenge the sample set producers to produce at least a few mono sets that would facilitate putting a virtual organ in an existing acoustic.


If you load any stereo sample set in mono within Hauptwerk then Hauptwerk will convert it to mono without mixing the stereo channels, so as to avoid phase cancellation. Hence any dry (or semi-dry) sample sets should work well in principle for 'case 2', given a sufficient number of speakers and a not-entirely-dry listening room (since you would then be using, and relying on, the listening room's acoustic, instead of the real recorded organ's acoustic).
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.
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Eric Sagmuller

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Re: OPEN LETTER TO SAMPLE SET PRODUCERS

PostThu Sep 21, 2017 11:27 am

adri wrote:


Finally, some others who feel the same way as I do about this. Nothing against HW, but it's just the nature of the beast and any VPO for that matter. In fact I rarely listen to Contrebombarde for that reason. But CD recording yes, no matter how badly they were butchered as someone suggested.

Eric[/quote]

In defense of listening to Contrebombarde: whether or not I like the playing of pieces or the organs used, or the registrations used or tempos applied, or whatever, this place is an absolutely fantastic discovery zone !

:-)[/quote]

Adri,

I agree there is alot of talent on that site. And I do at times listen to a piece here and there.

Probably the biggest struggle I find is loosing clarity as one adds stops. Like all of the sounds run together and almost like they are fighting each other. Particularly the treble or melody line and pedal lines get lost. I notice this much less so with CD recordings.

As far as using multiple speakers in a speaker group, that does sound more pleasing to me. Particularly the sound is not so localized as only using one pair. It helps to make the speakers disappear if that makes sense.

Eric
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Re: OPEN LETTER TO SAMPLE SET PRODUCERS

PostThu Sep 21, 2017 1:40 pm

This has turned into a rather interesting topic and I always like to hear what others are experiencing. A couple things.... First, the mention I see quite often of the 'mixing in the air' and I guess I look at it differently. My take is that unless you are in a very large room / church, etc., I really can't agree that most of us are actually achieving any real mixing in the air, that takes some room to do and as it has been said, the best stop on an organ is the room it is in. As mentioned, there's going to be room interaction no matter what, and depending on how close you position yourself to your speakers this will also vary to a greater or lesser extent. At best, I feel most of us are simulating 'mixing in the air' to one extent or another and are not truly achieving real mixing in the air, such as in the example of my paltry 12' x 12' rather dead acoustical space. Their ain't a whole lot of mixing going on. :mrgreen:

For those of us who have been on the forum here for quite sometime (myself included), some likely know (and have read) I have posted several times about various speaker placements, arrangements, audio routing configurations and so on I have tried over the years, so many different ones I've literally lost count, but I recall the outcome of many.

Yes, if you're close enough to a real organ you can hear the left and right of the pipes, if that's what you want to produce in your setting I know of 2 ways. Either have enough speakers placed to the left and right to set them up in groups to use one of Hauptwerk's algorithms, or do it yourself by choosing where you want things to go when you first load the organ. If you really wanted to attempt to get accurate to the real thing, the sample set producer would supply a chart of the organ case showing where in the case the various pipes are located, then you'd arrange your speakers in such a manner related to the case / pipe layout to route the ranks to those speakers, the number of speakers needed to accomplish this is definitely in question. The problem with this type of arrangement is you would end up with speakers in various locations closer and further apart, higher and lower, etc., and I'd fear it would totally ruin the stereo image as I have tried such arrangements in the past and is exactly what I experienced, a very odd sounding stereo image, let's just say it wasn't good and leave it at that.

Now, the issue with one single pair of speakers regardless of up close to you or not and how good of quality or not is as others have mentioned, the more stops you pile on, the worse the clarity gets, stops get lost in the mix as they get overtaken by others, and again I have also experienced this and no quality of speaker will correct this as we're simply asking the speakers to do too much all at once. As I've reported in the past, the best speaker layout I've found is when they are stacked on top of each other vertically to the left and right of the console in fairly close proximity to me, and the stacks being around 5 or so feet apart. Too close together and you lose some of the stereo image, too far apart and you have a hole in the middle, this is subject to a bit of tweaking of spacing between stacks for best results. 6 or more channels is what you're going to want.

The next thing then is, how do we route the audio? After several configurations including using the algorithms, I first discovered using 6 channels up front (and you could go to 8 or more if you'd like and got the room) that sending divisions to each pair sounded pretty good. This alleviated some of the muddy sound and loss of clarity when adding stops but not all of it and there was still something missing. I got to thinking about how various stops of different timbre might clash, especially when we're asking those different sounding stops to sound through the same speakers. In a real organ case we don't mix flutes and trumpets together in a row right next to each other, they're separated from each other and are in families if you will, so this got me to thinking, how about if I treat it the same way when I route the audio? My theory was since I don't have enough speakers for each pipe which would be a ridiculous amount of speakers, not to mention the audio equipment to support such an arrangement, that it would probably work well to send similar sounding ranks to the same pairs of speakers, put them in families so to speak, and in this case we are at least not asking very dissimilar sounding ranks to compete with each other over the same speakers. This arrangement for me has resulted in by far the most realism and clarity, clarity alone was upped 50%. It also produced the least amount of harshness and clashing, and seems to do the best in simulating the mixing in the air phenomena. Is there more to make yet a further improvement, I don't know, I'm still pondering options but haven't made any further attempts as it generally involves a rather lengthy tear down, last one took me all of a Saturday, so I'm going to have to be well convinced of my next idea before I try it. :lol:

Unless it's a dry set and as mentioed you are simply building an organ in your space, the only option I see at this point is headphones.

Marc
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telemanr

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Re: OPEN LETTER TO SAMPLE SET PRODUCERS

PostThu Sep 21, 2017 2:13 pm

But when listening to an orchestra at home on a stereo setup this would imply that as more of the orchestra was employed we would lose or muddy the individual instrument sounds. Leaving aside the individual strings perhaps, I can certainly hear flute, bassoon, etc. I really don’t see that it is anymore of a compromise than two near image speakers in HW. You’d have to suppose that when recording multiple pipes the muddying starts with the microphones used since they have to record many difference frequencies from various sources. Precisely the reverse of reproducing what the mikes recorded.
Of course it’s all a compromise.
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Re: OPEN LETTER TO SAMPLE SET PRODUCERS

PostThu Sep 21, 2017 2:52 pm

telemanr wrote:But when listening to an orchestra at home on a stereo setup this would imply that as more of the orchestra was employed we would lose or muddy the individual instrument sounds. Leaving aside the individual strings perhaps, I can certainly hear flute, bassoon, etc. I really don’t see that it is anymore of a compromise than two near image speakers in HW. You’d have to suppose that when recording multiple pipes the muddying starts with the microphones used since they have to record many difference frequencies from various sources. Precisely the reverse of reproducing what the mikes recorded.
Of course it’s all a compromise.


I hear ya Rob, but this Hauptwerk thing from what I've found when it comes to playback is an entirely different animal in comparison to just playing a cd or listening to a program over a pair of speakers. I suspect the difference is instead of listening to all from just a single recording like a cd where all is captured in a single recording and played back all at once, Hauptwerk is different in that we have multiple recordings all being played at once. Just a theory, but I think I'm on to something here and it has a dramatic effect on things.

Marc
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Re: OPEN LETTER TO SAMPLE SET PRODUCERS

PostThu Sep 21, 2017 3:45 pm

Why does the sound of a Hauptwerk organ often become muddier when more stops are engaged? I think there can be numerous reasons:

* many frequencies sounding at the same time producing beats and a more complex sound in general - this effect is also present in real organs
* recording distance (dominant acoustics) - again, this effect is also present in real organs, as you move away from the organ the sound becomes muddier especially for large registrations
* redundancies and mistakes in the registration, e.g. adding many flutes to a plenum - less is more, also on a real organ
* intermodular distortion - this can be alleviated by using many speakers or a very high quality speaker pair
* more room resonances may be excited when the volume increases and when more frequencies are present - this effect can be decreased using room correction methods
* background noise accumulation - sample set makers filter out the background noise, but some noise may remain, which will accumulate as more stops and notes are engaged.
* multiple recording positions resulting in non-matching acoustics - this may apply to surround and 6-channel sets, but also to a few stereo sets (e.g. Hereford: "the Solo box shutters face east, thus limiting its effect in the Nave. The decision was taken to move the sampling microphones to get a more direct sound" http://www.lavenderaudio.co.uk/organs/h ... organ.html)
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Re: OPEN LETTER TO SAMPLE SET PRODUCERS

PostThu Sep 21, 2017 4:45 pm

josq wrote:Why does the sound of a Hauptwerk organ often become muddier when more stops are engaged? I think there can be numerous reasons:

* many frequencies sounding at the same time producing beats and a more complex sound in general - this effect is also present in real organs
* recording distance (dominant acoustics) - again, this effect is also present in real organs, as you move away from the organ the sound becomes muddier especially for large registrations
* redundancies and mistakes in the registration, e.g. adding many flutes to a plenum - less is more, also on a real organ
* intermodular distortion - this can be alleviated by using many speakers or a very high quality speaker pair
* more room resonances may be excited when the volume increases and when more frequencies are present - this effect can be decreased using room correction methods
* background noise accumulation - sample set makers filter out the background noise, but some noise may remain, which will accumulate as more stops and notes are engaged.
* multiple recording positions resulting in non-matching acoustics - this may apply to surround and 6-channel sets, but also to a few stereo sets (e.g. Hereford: "the Solo box shutters face east, thus limiting its effect in the Nave. The decision was taken to move the sampling microphones to get a more direct sound" http://www.lavenderaudio.co.uk/organs/h ... organ.html)


Exactly my point(s), you just went into further depth. I think the challenge in creating the best realism is we're first working with multiple (thousands of) recordings and possibly from several different positions vs. one single recording done in one position all at once. When we play these multiple recordings all at once or in various combinations and with the variables involved against each other, it's really nowhere the same as listening to an organ on a CD. I'd like to hear an organ CD produced from chopped up bits and pieces of the same performance, then all sewn together to make the whole recording and I'd bet we'd hear something entirely different. Just dreaming here, but it would be great to have the ability to record all the stops all at once and from the same position, then somehow pick out and isolate each stop by itself to create a sample set, but that of course is wishful thinking and isn't going to happen, that is unless someone has come up with something totally new we've never heard of. You never know! :wink:

Marc
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