I am using my G70 (the FantomX 'Ultimate Grand' at P.Creek, if you want to listen) in studios that have Ivory on hand.

No-one has ever said 'We HAVE to replace this with Ivory".

We even have a 1928 Steinway. Most of the time, we hook up the K2500X's 88 wood to the G70. Record it dry, and run it through a nice convolution reverb... Perfect!

File size does NOT matter... What matters is the quality of the recordings in the first place, how good the initial piano is (some dogs out there... beware!), how well it was tuned and regulated, how consistent the playing, how well miked it was, how accurate the phase between mikes (there's the main thing, IMO ).

1GB of out of phase, hollow sounding piano samples doesn't come CLOSE to even equaling 64MB of exquisitely recorded, perfectly matched samples.

Once upon a time, sampling a grand piano took unbelievable skill. Memory wasn't sufficient to allow a brute force approach, so what little you DID have to work with needed to be pristine, as perfect as it could be, to overcome the flaws that looping and short samples would invariably add. But nowadays, with GIGA sized libraries popping up all the time, many are content to just sample every note, as many velocities as the can, no loops, multiple mike positions, pedal-up, pedal down, soft pedal, you name it. But what they usually forget is, how does it SOUND?

I've been a Purgatory Creek addict since it started. And, as more and more huge libraries got added, I started to ask myself 'why do they sound so bad?'. Nine times out of ten, what I usually come away with is a sense of 'out of phase-ness', a lack of 'body' and warmth, the inability to be BOTH warm and detailed at low to mid velocities, and bright and clear at high velocities. A few manage it, most do not...

Personally, I am MORE than happy to use a small size piano sample set, with no pedal down layers, with no soft pedal samples, with no different mike positions... I don't need a computer, it has basically zero latency, it comes to the gig with me with no extra hardware, and it keeps some of the pickiest ears in the business very happy.

What more do you need?