Ravenscroft 275 Piano 4+

When I first purchased Ravenscroft 275 I was quite disappointed with the sound. When I played with greater velocity it never seemed to deliver the percussive, brighter hammer action sound I felt it should have. And no matter how I adjusted the two Velocity parameters in the App I was disappointed. Well, my M-Audio Keystation 88 began to have problems with a few keys loosing their velocity. And this keyboard had no internal way to adjust the velocity sensitivity. That was totally dependent on the software. I replaced the Keystation 88 with the Nektar LX88+ which does have internal adjustment of velocity. It allows the full spectrum of the Ravenscroft 275 to come through. I am now more satisfied with the resulting sound. However, it still lacks a realistic hammer attack in the sound. The main thing this has going for it is sympathetic resonance. I seriously feel I get a more satisfying result with several pianos from iGrand and SampleTank. Being some of the early releases of sampled pianos for IOS, they lack sympathetic resonance. But with careful blending of some reverb that can help, somewhat, in that area. The other shortcoming of iGrand is a 64 note polyphony limitation. I have several of the major acoustic pianos for IOS. But, I still tend to favor the pianos in iGrand and SampleTank.

I play literally hundreds of Darius digital pianos with USB midi and audio connectivity. I’ve also played hundreds of professional acoustic grand pianos. For an inexpensive acoustic piano app, this is certainly one of the best I’ve used on a digital piano or midi controller digital piano. Beautiful, resonate sound with long damper pedal decay time and It has enough features to do most of the editing that I want. But as far as I can tell it’s missing half-damper pedal control when connected to a digital piano, and for me that’s a big issue. I like the expressiveness and control of the half-damper pedal which most lower and higher priced digital pianos now have internally. Acoustic pianos have continuous variable damper pedal control, but when using this app it does not send that function to the sustain pedal so it’s just basically on and off with a little bit of re-pedaling which can make the sound a bit choppy when using a sustain pedal. Not very happy with that. Perhaps Ravenscroft can do something about this or let me know if I am missing something here. Otherwise the app is very usable and much better than most, especially for the money.

It would help if the developer would provide some documentation, which I can’t seem to find anywhere... The problems I encounter seem to be a function of the limited resources of the (2018) iPad. It doesn’t do polyphony well, and the sound will degrade with big arpeggiated chords and lots of pedaling (i.e.: Debussy). Ditto for the sample rate and buffer size. Just leave those at default or the latency will get ugly. If you have a good midi keyboard, keep the velocity around 95% for the best touch vs. volume. And ditto the Equalizer. Any adjustments more than just a little above/below the mean will sound terrible. If you accept the above limitations you will get the most from these gorgeous samples. Just don’t expect the same openness and presence as computer software like Pianoteq 6, etc. Phones and tablets simply don’t have the resources for that. However you can expect to enjoy a very pleasant and acceptably realistic piano sound. It’s a very good portable alternative to being tethered to a computer, and I think that’s all this app was ever meant to be.