Dexibell T2L Piano virtual instrument

Software
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Hi all, I’ve been spending these last few days reading up on Zynthian assembly, latency, UI and looping/arranging capabilities, will likely order one in a month or two depending on budget. It looks awesome.

Before that, I had decided to satisfy my small-form-factor piano & keyboard sound needs with a Dexibell SX8 sound module. Dexibell being the reincarnation of the shuttered Roland Europe (Italy) division, with a specific focus on authentic piano sounds and a bunch more stuff that you want in a stage piano or digital piano for at home.

Following their YouTube channel, I just saw that they repackaged their engine plus all their various piano sounds into another form factor and released it as plugin for Windows, Mac (on ARM) and Linux, including LV2.

I am now wondering whether they’d be open to a similar collab as the one that Zynthian has with Pianoteq. From a technology point of view, it seems like a match made in heaven - their engine is basically a rompler with some extra physical modelling targeted (mostly) to pianos, which should result in much reduced CPU load at still very high-quality piano feel, at full sample rates.

On the stage pianos and sound module, each of Dexibell’s “Platinum” sounds account for about 700-800 MB in storage, which are loaded into memory at start. I gather it takes about the same amount of RAM, because the SX8 sound module has a max of 4G RAM and the user-loadable voices in storage have the same restriction. Their virtual instrument plugin ships all 7 or so of those pianos, hopefully it has an option to disable some of them for lower memory use.

The SX8 supports 3 “chains” on a quad-core Cortex (which one?), the flagship S10 stage piano with presumably similar hardware does 4 but one of them “coupled” to another voice. Unlimited polyphony with seamless patch switching and effect changes. I figure it would not run too poorly on the Raspberry Pi, though how exactly it compares against Pianoteq would have to be seen.

Perhaps if @jofemodo approaches them for a similar demo+unlock repackaging on Zynthian, they might be open to the idea? Personally I’d be excited about getting these pianos into the same box as all the existing synth & groovebox & hackable FOSS stuff, throwing any remaining daisy-chaining latency or CPU load concerns out the window.

Thanks for all your work and see you again after I actually order a V5.1 :slight_smile:

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It’s a great opportunity but as usual they don’t specify a processor for Linux, so it’s probably not available for Arm.

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Yeah, I’m pretty sure their published Linux build is only x86-64 right now. But they’re a smaller company which already has a (presumably Linux-based) ARM build on their hardware devices, so it’s not unthinkable that they’d add an ARM Linux package if we ask nicely with a particular use case and userbase in tow.

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I listened carefully to some demos… for my taste PianoteQ is absolutely superior. But of course it depends on personal taste. It seems to me that these pianos lack the bright sound that I love and are a bit “muffled”. The price is clearly better… But I don’t know if I would buy it.

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I decided to send an email to Dexibell by myself. Let’s see how they feel about it! If anything comes out of it, I’ll update this thread.

In terms of sound, there are various parameters and also a Bright preset for each piano. I don’t have the comparison with Pianoteq, will perhaps try comparing them later side by side once I have both at hand, but to me the Dexibell pianos do play well and sound good (especially the “Italian” Fazioli and “USA” Steinway). At the very least it’s a giant upgrade from my older Clavinova digital piano. I’d rather be able to layer a bunch of extra synths on top than to squeeze out the last ounce of physical accuracy but limited to 24 kHz :slight_smile:

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