tough sounds to reproduce ???

Nil...huh?
I have my Steinway B positioned between and a few feet behind my Parsifal Encores. I hear GREAT piano upper octaves from my EMC-1 MkII/AlephP/Aleph2s?Encore system.
It's the LOWER octaves that aren't the same!
A grand piano's upper octaves DON"T have "body and weight".
Quite the contrary. They're thin, short, and basically excite only a small portion of the soundboard.
The bass strings excite the entire soundboard, and thus launch a HUGE pressurewave into the room which no reasonable number of speaker transducers can replicate.
Although I enjoy full-scale piano recordings on my system
(Nojima's Liszt on RefRec comes to mind as a great one), it's not the same as sitting down and exciting a giant diaphragm when I stretch out on those big Brahms chords.
Additionally, the top octaves' propagation toward the player or listener is VERY variable as a function of listening position, head angle, lid geometry, etc.
The ONLY way my B sounds right in the upper octaves to me WHWEN PLAYING it in my room is when the lid is fully shut, but the front door is wide open, yielding a constant depth
full-width "window" or port, if you will.
Sorry to belabor this, but getting a great system to do piano top octaves is not that hard. Voicing the damned piano is MUCH harder! Cheers.

Thanks Abstract. The rebuilder who voiced my B has played near too many drummers in trios over the past couple of decades. I've managed to sell two Subies to TWO other good tuner/rebuilder/musicians (bass players) in the past year, and all three of them agree that the low-treble of the B is commonly known as the "money octave" because one can constantly chase its voicing anomolies over time. And MY tuner (head of the guild) drives a Volvo...although that'll be temporary!
RE: computer tuning
Do you mean that tuning aid the techs use with the xirxling LEDs? Those little boxes cost a lot ($1200-$2k?) exactly BECAUSE they have memories stuffed with exact tuning pitches for LOTS of different piano makes and sizes. Joe just dials up Steinway B and starts there...all the partials line up right away, so fine-tuning becomes a breeze.
Voicing via hammer-felt hardness, thickness, and geometry is the tricky stuff...and we ALL hear it differently!
RE: mased violins
Heard Zander and the BPO doing Mahker's 9th last Saturday,
and was initially surprised by the brightness of the strings. Remembered that by being in the balcony we were on axis to their boards' radiation. My old friend and recording engineer/acoustician Tom Horrall added that he could only imagine how hotter still they sounded to the mics
arrayed much closer, but in-line with our axis.
No wonder massed strings can be so relentless in many recordings!
RE: Mapleshades
I kinda like Sprey's PZM recordings, yet another friend who teaches recording tech at Berklee listened to a couple of them and quickly taught me how to hear their phase errors.
But I soon forgot what he said!
He wants me to try Earthworks mics for my piano, but I'm hesitant to make the investment.
Sorry to get off-track.
I like the analysis of oceanside sounds....