Synthogy Ivory II American Concert D

I ended up buying this after reading lots of reviews that this was one of the best digital pianos. I have to concur, now that I have had it for a few weeks and been playing it. This is a fantastic piano. It feels real and rich, second only to Keyscape or Garritan. Between me and some of my musician friends, Keyscape is the best piano available. (It's a hidden gem, because Keyscape is advertised mostly for its Rhodes and other sounds, but really its grand piano is the shining star. If you haven't looked into that, check it out, because it's on another level.) But Ivory is still amazing. Keyscape and Garritan are Yamaha pianos, and Ivory is a Steinway, so the tone of the pianos is completely different. As far as a Steinway goes, Ivory is awesome.My mom is a classical pianist, and she has always liked Steinway pianos, and she absolutely loved the sound of this piano. She couldn't stop talking about how good the tone is. Ivory for the win. If you're contemplating whether this is the piano for you, go listen to some samples on Youtube. You'll probably be sold pretty quickly.The only downside about this was the install method. Other modern digital pianos are being shipped on a USB stick. This one came as a package of 7 DVD's. It was annoying to have to keep switching out the disc. It would be nice to be able to go away while it is installing and come back when it's done. But fortunately you only have to do that once. After it is installed, you forget how long it took to install because you end up spending hours and hours playing it because it sounds so good.Another nice thing was that this piano doesn't use much CPU. Other instruments (like Keyscape) put a heavy load on the computer, and tend to skip and pop if you're not using a high-end Mac. The Ivory doesn't put much drain on the computer, and I have played for a long time without any glitches on a couple different computers. The engineers did a good job optimizing the software.One more thing - the older versions of Ivory required a physical iLok USB key, which was annoying. This newer Ivory piano supports the latest iLok software, and will register directly to the computer without needing a separate USB key. Hassle-free now. That's a major plus! Great job Ivory!

I purchased this through Sweetwater Sound a few years ago. I also purchased an ILOK in order to use it. I used this program along with a Yamaha CP300 stage piano and a Steinberg U22. Well, after using this for a few months, I found that it didn't sound as good as the original CP300 piano (at least not to me). Of course, the comparison of this product along with internal piano sounds and other products is highly subjective. However, I just was not able to determine that this product's piano sounds were better and I was somewhat disappointed. I gave it two stars for effort but that's about it.

Wonderful! For the first time since I've been producing music digitally, I have a piano that actually sounds like a piano. The piano and the included reverb are incredibly realistic. You can controll everything - key noise, pedal noise, soundboard resonance, piano lid up or down, etc. Long, long decay for each note; if there's any looping going on here, I sure can't hear it. There are two slight downsides: make sure you have a full afternoon for installation (it's easy, but time-consuming because of all the data that must be copied), and it's a bit of a resource hog, which might cause issues on an old computer. That said, I'm running it on a 2013 iMac with an i7 CPU and 16GB of RAM, and have used several tracks of Ivory in a huge mix with lots of automation, without any problems. Highly recommended!

Awesome program. Can tweak it for whatever you are playing through and save the settings. Have one setting for playing it through studio speakers and one for headphones. Everything can be tweaked: Resonance, pedal noise, EQ ,reverb , touch, release, key noise, dynamic range, trim, stereo width, sustain resonance, sympathetic resonance, low shelf frequency and gain, parametric frequency gain and bandwidth, high shelf frequency and gain, chorus and ambience, hardness, velocity min and max, velocity map... And on and on.... Such a beautiful sound and a pleasure to play. I use an old Kurzweil PC 88 mx to control it. I can't say enough good about this program. My musicianship has increased greatly because I can't wait to spend hours playing and practicing. (I was a music theory major years ago and have a well trained ear..... Did I say I love this sound and playability! :) )

I intended to purchase Synthogy Ivory II American Concert D but changed my mind due to the many iLok negative reviews and horror stories. Not sure when or if I will take the plunge.

I own several piano libraries, including the Eastwest Quantum Leap Pianos library. For performance, this is the best library I have ever played, by far. The EWQL Pianos sound nicer for composition (such as chording filmic style compositions) but the playability of it is very bad (the velocity curves don't feel or sound right). This library, on the other hand, plays very beautifully and feels nice when playing different velocities.

I have spent the last few days testing Synthogy Ivory II American Steinway. After many years of loving the Italian Grand, neither one beats the Galaxy Vintage D. I love the Galaxy!!! ...especially after the 1.2 update.American Steinway is too "honky", midrangey in the mid-range. Thin overall. Check out Galaxy. Very tweakable. No Ilok either.