

Both are somewhat sonically flawed and frustrating, but the Ravenscroft software gives you more freedom to blend the ideal piano timbre of your personal preference. Besides also providing you the similar EQ and fine-tune adjustments anyway that you'd get from Ivory, once you've got your basic touch curve, overall EQ, brilliance, bass / treble ratio dialed in to your liking, which pretty much either never changes (for all piano VSTs you play) or is context dependent on the style of piano music you're trying to make, but is in all cases merely the broader brush-strokes, before the real subjective artistic piano-phile business of finding a piano timbre you're 95% satisfied with - which is a process of lengthy experiment and discovery with Ravenscroft and its 4 mic perspective mix sliders, whereas Ivory is a straight take-it-or-leave-it deal. The Ravenscroft has 4 different recorded multisamples, 4 different stereo mic perspectives, and 4 slightly different mic responses / acoustic path tonalities, 4 different fidelities of impulse transient capture, 4 different mic-to-instrument location distances, 4 different sonic soundscapes to play with or mix together. You can tweak it: brighter vs darker, harder vs softer, dry & clean or wet & resonant, shape the EQ, bias your touch curve, etc., etc., etc., but it's all basically just re-moulding the behaviour of the same recorded multi-samples from one stereo microphone characteristic. The Ivory II American D Steinway is basically one stereo multi-sample set.
