To echo yesterday -- never, ever, judge a reproducing piano system on
the basis of simulated MIDI files!  The quality of the simulations
varies greatly, and the MIDI playback systems aren't calibrated either,
so even a file that plays decently on one may sound awful on another.

Likewise, don't use published recordings of systems to judge them.  For
reasons that are hard to fathom, over the years many recordings have
used utterly awful instruments -- and I mean awful to a startlingly and
utterly gross degree.  If you hear a recording that sounds good, that's
fine, but one that's awful almost certainly shows up the producers, not
the instrument or the system.

Closer to home, though, there's one other thing not to use to judge
systems and instruments, and that's recut rolls.  The vast majority
of recuts in existence are one-to-one [asynchronous] copies which,
no matter how well done, are always liable to errors in punch spacing.
Such errors give poor timing in the music and misdirect the dynamic
expression systems -- the latter being, of necessity, very sensitive
in these instruments if they are to be capable of achieving musical
accents.

Many recuts over the years have been nowhere near the best that can
be achieved with one-to-one copying.  Either they used very coarse
punch-row spacing or the reading was so inaccurate that notes were
simply in the wrong place, and horribly extended so that repeats failed
and everything got stuttery and mushed up.  That said, there are some
very good one-to-one copies as well.  Better still, though, are the
more modern copies made using "reconstructed master rolls" which have
each and every punch (in theory) exactly in the right relative place,
so you get exactly the same note and expression timing as an original
roll.

To this extent, Ampico has been better served because of the survival
of a significant number of the original production masters, which has
allowed latter-day production of rolls to factory quality.  On the other
hand, Duo-Art has been particularly badly served by some recutters who
failed to get the "snakebite" accents even vaguely near the notes they
were supposed to be accenting, which completely destroys the intended
performance.

Curiously, Welte in its earlier days shot itself in the foot with
their roll-manufacturing, because for several years they did not use
a master-roll setup and instead issued one-to-one copies with all the
variation that is inevitable with such a process.  Some appear to
have the dynamic coding offset relative to the notes, which hardly
surprisingly fails to give the expected performance.

Given a good original roll, though, all the systems are more than
capable of giving a great performance.  As a Duo-Art enthusiast,
I find great pleasure in listening to fine Ampico and Welte-Mignon
instruments.  The systems are not homogeneous and indistinguishable,
though.  All differ somewhat in their capabilities -- degree and speed
of accenting, finesse of quiet playing, etc -- and in how the rolls
were edited.  Comparative listening can be very interesting, but if the
piano's working well you really ought to find yourself simply listening
to the music on any of these systems.

Julian Dyer