PSR e473 - "incoherent" sound of pitches in some voices. Question to e473 owners

[arjen23]

I made an interesting discovery about some voices in psr e473. First it occured to me on voice 002 (grand piano) that E pitch in second octave sounds a bit louder than adjacent pitches (of course with dynamics set to fixed). This did not occur on Live grand piano (001) but occured on some other vocices as well.

Later I did an experiment. I was playing adjacent keys with one with pitch bend wheel on full tilt to make them sound exactly the same pitch. In some voices, like Live Grand Piano, the pitches sounded (as it was expected) exactly the same but in others (like regular Grand Piano) there were significant difference in sound colour (although the pitch was exactly the same - checked with KORG eletronic chromatic tuner) almost like some kind of different equalization was used on different pitches. I found it occuring not only with afromentioned E pitch but with several other pitches all over the keyboard range, and this was the cause of me percievieng the loudness differently, I believe.

Can this thing be a result of sloppines when recording samples for certain voices? TBH from a company like Yamaha I was expecting more precision... or maybe it is something wrong with my keyboard? (although i doubt it). I am curious if other e473 owners can repeat my test and will get same results. I will later also add videos of me doing said test (away from home right now).

Best regards and waiting for Your thoughts.

 

[delaware dave]

I made an interesting discovery about some voices in psr e473. First it occured to me on voice 002 (grand piano) that E pitch in second octave sounds a bit louder than adjacent pitches (of course with dynamics set to fixed). This did not occur on Live grand piano (001) but occured on some other vocices as well.

Later I did an experiment. I was playing adjacent keys with one with pitch bend wheel on full tilt to make them sound exactly the same pitch. In some voices, like Live Grand Piano, the pitches sounded (as it was expected) exactly the same but in others (like regular Grand Piano) there were significant difference in sound colour (although the pitch was exactly the same - checked with KORG eletronic chromatic tuner) almost like some kind of different equalization was used on different pitches. I found it occuring not only with afromentioned E pitch but with several other pitches all over the keyboard range, and this was the cause of me percievieng the loudness differently, I believe.

Can this thing be a result of sloppines when recording samples for certain voices? TBH from a company like Yamaha I was expecting more precision... or maybe it is something wrong with my keyboard? (although i doubt it). I am curious if other e473 owners can repeat my test and will get same results. I will later also add videos of me doing said test (away from home right now).

Best regards and waiting for Your thoughts.

Have no clue as to the cause. The keyboard retails for $370 so the manufacturing cost of the keyboard is no more than half of that. Not sure you can expect the attention to detail that you would get in a $1000 and up keyboard. They may have reduced the sample size in order to fit it into the hardware of the keyboard offering. In that reduction of size the keyboard might exhibit the symptoms that you are experiencing. Hard to say from where I'm sitting.

 

[SeaGtGruff]

Many keyboards that play sound samples rather than creating their sounds internally via oscillators-- in other words, what are commonly referred to as "ROMplers" since they are "samplers" whose sound samples are stored in ROM-- especially less-expensive models or older models, might use a single sample to play multiple notes, by speeding up or slowing down the sampled sound so it plays at frequencies other than its "natural" or actual frequency.

This can make the notes which are produced by this "pitch-shifting" technique a less natural sound. To compensate for this, a voice that makes heavy use of this technique may have a number of different samples, each of which is used for generating notes within a certain frequency range. For instance, rather than one sample being used to cover all 128 possible MIDI notes, there might be 11 samples which are used to cover an octave's worth of notes per sample.

In contrast, the best sampled voices use a different sample for every note-- or, at least, a unique sample for those notes that can actually be sampled, as determined by the instrument whose notes are being sampled. For instance, a piano normally has 88 keys, whereas the MIDI standard allows for 128 notes, so a piano voice might have 88 sampled notes and then pitch-shift the lowest and highest notes to produce notes that go beyond the normal range of a piano.

Yamaha ROMplers can use a variety of different "types" of voices, as indicated by descriptors in their names such as "Live!" or "Cool!", as well as XG-- or, in the case of the PSR-E models, XGlite-- voices, which use an older sampled sound technology. Consequently, the XGlite voices will probably make much heavier use of pitch-shifting than the newer "Live!" voices do.

I'm not saying that this explains whatever phenomenon you've noticed, but it would be my first guess.