East West Bosendorfer 290 GrandPiano VSTi (Macintosh and Windows)

Bösendorfer 290 Grand Piano virtual instrument 23 People rated this product:

Rate and Review This Product

Roll Over to Enlarge

Main

overview specs docs

Product Description

zZounds is an
authorized East West dealer

The 5-star awarded PMI Bösendorfer 290 is simply the best sampled Bösendorfer 290 Grand Piano on the planet - and now it's available as a 24-bit plug-in for the first time.

This pristine piano library has finally captured all of the beauty of this piano. Up to 16 velocity layers, true release samples, true repedalling and two different microphone positions (close and ambient) for ultimate ambience control... and best of all: it sounds as good as the real thing! This Plug-In version comes with 28 programs (9 Dry programs, 9 Wet programs (with and without true real-time repedalling), 3 Dry & Wet layered programs and several FX variations. The bass of this instrument is absolutely huge with a very focused pitch.

PMI Bosendorfer 290 comes as a virtual instrument which includes a high-performance Native Instruments interface powered by the efficient Kontakt audio engine, including Direct-from-Disk*, for Mac and PC (*With freely-downloadable Direct-from-Disk extension).

The virtual instrument combines intuitive handling with excellent 24-bit sound quality, and functions as a plug-in instrument, without the need for a sampler.

For the sonically adventureous, many sound shaping tools have been built in to the interface. Powerful multi-mode filters, envelopes, and LFOs give a wealth of creative possibilities. Integrated high-quality reverb, chorus, and delay effects are also provided.

Direct from Disk playback easily handles large samples beyond available RAM (which is assignable.) zZounds is an authorized dealer of East West products.

System Requirements

2 GB Free Hard Disc Space, DVD Drive

Minimum Requirements (for Native Instruments software):
Windows XP/ME/98, Pentium III/Athlon 500 Mhz, 256 MB RAM
Mac OS 9.2, OS 10.2.6 or higher, G3 500 Mhz, 256 MB RAM

Recommended System (for Native Instruments software)
Windows XP, P III/Athlon 700 MHz, 1 GB RAM
Mac OS 9.2, OS 10.2.6 or higher, G4 733, 1 GB RAM

Recommended System (for sound library)
EastWest recommends using a fast processor and up to 1.5 GB of free RAM to optimize the performance of this sound module.

Compatibility:
WIN (VST®2.0, DXi2, ASIO, MME, Direct Sound, **RTAS)
MAC (VST®2.0, ASIO, Soundmanager, OMS, Audio Units, Core Audio, ***RTAS)
(**RTAS support for Windows will be available as a free download later.)
(***RTAS is not supported for MAC OS9)

*DFD - Direct from Disk extension from www.soundsonline.com/techsupport.shtml is required.

Sound Samples

This item cannot be returned once opened due to copyright law. details

Our Return Policy

Payment Options

Purchase Orders

What Our Customers Are Saying About zZounds "zZounds wowed me with a perfectly smooth transaction and friendly and polite service." - customer on May 7th, 2012

Customer Reviews

4.5 out of 5 (23 ratings) Rate and Review This Product

Read 2 East West Bosendorfer 290 GrandPiano VSTi (Macintosh and Windows) Reviews

"L and R channels are swapped"

Sound: Sound is very good. The best of several piano synths I tried. Synthogy's Ivory was not out for PC when I bought this, and it may be better. I intend to try it, too. But this B290 will be tough to beat. Feature: It's a piano sound. Not many features, but the VST has lots of tweakable options. Quality: L and R channels are swapped. Otherwise, everything's fine. Value: Good value for a very good piano sound. Manufacturer Support: I rate support only a 7 not because they are bad, but because you have to get a software key sent to you to unlock the software. I have had software think I changed computers in the past when I've changed my configuration. If I could just re-activate over the net, that'd be fine, but I don't like having to wait to get an e-mail key sent to me. What if the company decides to stop supporting B290 and I change computers? I'm out of luck. The Wow Factor: I think it's between this and Ivory for the best PC piano sound. This one is a lot cheaper, but Ivory comes with 3 pianos. Overall: I'm satisfied. The L/R channel swap is annoying but easy to work around.

Style of Music: Classical

2 of 2 people (100%) found this review helpful. Did you?

Thanks for your opinion!

close [x]

Thank you. Your vote has been counted. Could you briefly tell us why the review was or was not helpful?

"Not ready for prime time"

Sound: Wet is way too wet to use, so 1/2 the samples just lay there taking up space on my hard drive. Dry is fairly wet in the upper registers, but it sounds pretty good actually. I use the "16 layer dry" patch mostly. Here are some things to be aware of: 1. The killer: volume matching between samples, particularly in the upper notes, is very poor. Go from velocity 32 to 31 and the notes practically falls off the edge of the earth. Go from velocity 63 to 64 and the volume jumps so much it sounds like someone is banging on that keys. So I have to scale my MIDI to stay mostly within this band, and then either hand or bulk edit the remaining notes into this velocity region. Makes things sound somewhat compressed as you might imagine, wich can sometimes be good, other times bad. No way to tweak this in the sample set AFAIK, otherwise I would definitely take the time to do it. So for me this is a two velocity sample set (pedal up and pedal down) - pathetic. 2. Fairly bad: The noise floor pumps around depending on how many notes are sustaining. I have to apply a fairly agressive noise minimization in CoolEdit before I can boost the treble at all. The pumping noise often sounds grainy, something like truncation noise. If it weren't for the magic of CoolEdit, this product would be completely useless to me. 3. Kind of bad: The dynamic range was set obviously for the loudest note, which makes the noise floor rather high when playing normally, particularly if many notes are decaying. I have to turn the output volume of the instrument up to +12dB, and even then it barely uses 1/3 of the 16 bit range. So for me this is a 14 bit instrument. So much for 24/96. 4. An annoyance: The dry sustained 32-63 velocity C below middle C sample sounds like someone dropped something in the studio several seconds into the recording. I wrote to EastWest with the issue, even sent them an MP3 of the sound, but they never replied. C being a fairly popular note, I usually have to tune the piano up a 1/2 step and then transpose my MIDI down 1/2 step to avoid it. Lame. 5. Trivial, but stupid: The left & right channels seem to be swapped, so I had to manually configure them in the ASIO driver. Feature: Reverb is simple and not very realistic; I have other filters that I understand better and use instead; the other effects aren't really useful for piano. Quality: Sample set leaves a lot to be desired in terms of consistency. ASIO very picky. L & R seem to be swapped. Value: Low value, I feel rather ripped off, and am actively looking for something different as a replacement. Have no idea how it stacks up to other products, but I hear it was the one to beeat just a short time ago. Manufacturer Support: Had terrible ASIO issues where if I increased the delay to the point where all the notes would actually play, the MIDI timing got obviously way out of whack. I could only contact the company via their web page email tool (pathetic). Their response took a couple of days and was somewhere between generic and specific, and there seemed to be a language barrier thing going on. I couldn't just reply to their email but had to use thier web email tool again to reply to their email - just gave up after a while due to the awkwardness. Resolved my ASIO issue by getting an Echo MIA MIDI card (awesome card BTW!). The Wow Factor: Not any more now that I see the crippling limitations of this product. Why can't I select zero here? Overall: Sounds good at first, but then you find it is almost useless.

5 of 7 people (71.43%) found this review helpful. Did you?

Thanks for your opinion!

close [x]

Thank you. Your vote has been counted. Could you briefly tell us why the review was or was not helpful?

Read 2 East West Bosendorfer 290 GrandPiano VSTi (Macintosh and Windows) Reviews