Hi All,
A new product from IK. You never know it might be good, the introductory price is very reasonable.
Cheers,
Dave
it is a monthly or yearly subscription… not so good price then for me…
It’s subscription if you want to have access to all the models & future additions but the individual models are available for sale. I would likely grab the Steinway and the Royal upright if I were buying and not the rest of them. I have pianos aplenty but this new entry intrigued me because of the way it was sampled.
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AFAIK, no demo available 
The NY Grand is amazing. Of course, they are following the multi piano plugins like Spectrasonics, GSI, Pianoteq, Addicted Keys, and others. Anyone can add a shimmer reverb to a piano, but I listen to the pure sound, without fx, to judge the character. The NY Grand audio sample on the Pianoverse perked my ears.
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True. More, speaking of pianos, I don’t trust so much the audio demos provided by the developers. I need to play the instrument, as if I were buying a real piano.
In 2013 I bought an EastWest piano, but never found a correct setting with the controller (velocity response big difficult).
Now I have a Kawai VPC1 on the way. It’s for the studio only, of course. It weighs over 30kg including pedalboard. Too bad that won’t help with gigs.
Recap: no demo? No new piano.
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I agree. That, and the required 20GB disk space.
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I get the arguments but in my case IK has offered “no demo” products before on introducing them and I bought when the price was low and won big. Also when you build up jam points you can apply them to the intro price so in this case you could grab a piano for 70 bucks after your jam points were included. For what I see offered that is a great price, On the sampled instrument aspect of it I have been running a 50 Gbyte library with Ivory’s Steinway D for years and use other sampled instruments all the time. 20 GBytes would be a big reduction in my case for the library size. Also this product is like a Acoustic Samples set in that there are some other non sample related tricks added into the mix. The only thing that ticks me off a bit is that they claim it’s more playable than other products like Pianoteq and some sampled instruments out there but as you all point out you can’t test their claim. 
I have been lucky with IK (Tonex, B-3X, IK Leslie, iRig) so I think I might take the plunge on one of the pianos to see if the claims are true. I’ll let you all know if I do. The demo videos also showed that loading a piano can take a bit, kind of like UVI workstation does with the AS and Ravenscroft libraries.
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So I am not a keys player, but do use piano in sequences. UVI Model D is working well for what I’m doing. So in you guy’s opinions does this product offer me much or is it probably where in my case it would be going after that last 2% of additional realism over what I’m using now?
They claim a lot of things. It sounds like an Apple keynote… “the best piano ever”.
With no: “one more thing”. 
And I’m running out of jam points.
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OK, I took the leap on the Steinway D and the Yamaha Upright but it will be a few days before I get it all going. I’ll be able to side by side it with Ravenscroft and Ivory Concert D. I’ll get back when I have a chance to play it some. Another thing is you can buy a month’s access to test the pianos and if you don’t like them you don’t have to own them. And now I’m running out of Jam points too … 
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I’m going to wait for more models (as promised by IK) before subscribing.
You mean the one from the bundle (Steinway, Bosendorfer, Yamaha) or the American Grand?
Sorry, I meant the American Grand. I have the bundle and like the German Steinway but I found it darker than I wanted for live and the American was brighter to me. The Yamaha from the bundle was too bright for what I like FWIW.
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American Grand is great. One of the best Steinway D. I’m curious about the new Ivory3, but again no-demo policy!
Me too, from the forums I hear it is a CPU and system hog with even larger libraries so for me it’s not suited to live work. But that said the demo audio of it sounds really good.
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I think for the use you have for piano sounds you’re fine. This newbie will just be another set of samples by a new vendor with a different and hopefully better samples & audio engine. Realism in the sound is different than realism in the feel of playing it live to me. Pianoteq is extremely playable but I don’t love the tone of it. Ivory is a hog and some sample sets are not consistent but it sounds really natural. That’s my curiosity. I have been playing the same sample set for a long while and I think I will be able to see if this is better or not from my perspective. We’ll see …
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OK, I did the first session yesterday on one of my gig rigs. It is about twice as resource hungry as Ivory and has some spiking issues on my rig at 128 samples on a Baby Face Pro interface. On a 2.9 Ghz I7 4 core running 128 sample buffer it uses 40% resources at idle and ranges up to 75% when playing normally with the occasional spike when you change velocity and note choices quickly (likely my streaming isn’t keeping up). With Pianoverse at 256 samples it settles down to about 22% at idle ranging up to 45% when playing At the 256 setting it works well and is no issue. It is also a larger library than advertised once installed. Instead of the 20Gbytes it weighed in at 29 Gbytes for the Grand and 32 Gbytes for the upright. It is miked very close and the samples are very dry with hardly any room sound in them. The have a round robin setup that makes it seem to have more character and the samples are bold compared to Ivory. I did the testing on an Oxygen 88 weighted action keyboard so it is a simple 2 contact keybed setup. I am going to connect the RD2000 and give it a test with that more advanced keybed and hammer action today. We’ll see how it goes. I worry I have played Ivory so long that I am not giving a fair chance to this and I have to tailor it more to my needs since it has a number of adjustments you can tweak to your taste. The Spaces are really good IMO but add to the resource hunger of the beast. The effects are great but are for Cinematic use IMO and wouldn’t help me in my live work. Anyway that’s the initial report. I’d be cautious using this live at small buffer sizes without a faster processor than I have.
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Did a rehearsal with the band subbing the NY Grand in for Ivory 2 American D on several songs. Using the RD2000 as the controller made it very enjoyable to play. It has a more natural sound to it than Ivory and Ravenscroft IMO . The singers especially noticed it was warm to sing over top of in solo accompaniment situations like FM’s Songbird. In the sonic sense it beat the pants off the Ivory patch I was using for the same piece, way more natural and alive. It’s more expressive and emotive to play than the other pianos I have. Ravenscroft has great samples but IMO doesn’t play as expressively or have as natural a sound. In the end all 3 would be (and are) great for Rock and Pop but for music with leaner mixes where the piano is predominant I would reach for the Pianoverse sample set followed by the Ravenscroft. I found out that it has a range of 20 layers down to 14 layers of sampling depending on the key being played. So, I like it a lot but as I said I had to adjust my rig to handle it properly, once that was done I had a great time playing it. I am hopeful that it gets a few improvements along the way that would aid the CPU load and the preset load times. Other than those gripes it was money well spent on yet another another piano VSTi. Now excuse me while I pop some more Rolaids for my recent gas attack … 
Cheers,
Dave
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Thanks for the review!
IKM has been killing it lately. Might have to try it.