Synthogy Ivory 3 German D

One of the most highly regarded piano libraries around gets an update. Does it strike a chord with our reviewer, Herr Roland Schmidt?

Back in the early-to-mid '00s, sampling came of age. One of the companies at the forefront of the pursuit of multi-sampling perfection was Synthogy. Its original Ivory package was accompanied by rapturous applause from the professional and producer community, as it became an overnight industry standard.

Shuffle on 19 years and Ivory reaches its Mk3 phase, centred around an extensively sampled, Hamburg-manufactured, Steinway Model D-274. Steinway is arguably the most highly regarded piano manufacturer in the world, with the Model D considered to be the finest concert grand. It's certainly the largest, at 274cm in length, but with this size comes an authority in sound, which has established the brand as the primary choice for most concert halls.

It's therefore hardly a surprise that Synthogy has chosen to capture this European Model D by reuniting members of its established sampling team, in the prestigious venue of Le Domaine Forget de Charlevoix Concert Hall.

Under the lid

There are a considerable number of new features included in this sizeable upgrade. Firstly, Synthogy has a new sound engine called Real-time Gradient Blending (RGB). In layman's terms, it's an update to the real-time playback technology and DSP, taking the sound of the plugin to the next level. This translates to some impressive stats; Ivory 3 now responds to the MIDI 2.0 specification, although original MIDI controller users will still benefit from the usual 127 velocity points on the curve. This single piano will require 42GB of disk space, although Synthogy specify that this needs to be in SSD format, presumably because of the impacted speeds for reliable sample retrieval.