Unfortunately I don't have enough spare money to buy an actual grand piano (nor the place to put it; it would probably have to double up as a dining table). But the next best thing seems to be Pianoteq by Modartt. This makes your computer sound like a grand piano (the actual piano keys and pedals being provided by my existing digital piano, which hooks up to the computer by USB), and not by playing sampled notes from real grand pianos either, but by actually calculating the physics of an actual grand piano in real time. Wild. And it even runs natively on Linux!

Modartt offer a trial version of Pianoteq which runs for 20 minutes and plays a number of strategic notes only at very low volume. I installed this on a clunky old laptop with a Core 2 Duo processor and 2 gigs of RAM that I happened to have lying around (based on Debian GNU/Linux with a realtime kernel for low latency) and it seems to work just fine. The sound is quite extraordinarily realistic.

So I'm planning to buy an actual unrestricted copy in the near future. I intend to use this in my office/“recording studio” where I have my old master keyboard and vintage Korg DS-8 synth, in order to be able to produce better-sounding digital recordings of my SCD music. I'm scheduled to get a new laptop for work and will probably be allowed to keep the old one, which is considerably beefier than the ancient machine I used to try Pianoteq, so this one will likely become the music PC; it's most convenient to have a separate machine for music production because the configuration required for realtime capability makes the computer less useful for general work.

My main remaining question as far as Pianoteq is concerned seems to be what grand piano to buy – I'll probably go for the lowest tier of Pianoteq (“Stage”) first, and that lets you pick two “instrument packs”, so I'm thinking the “upright pianos” pack and one grand (there are a number of free instruments like a clavichord, cembalos, and hammer pianos thrown in at no charge, but these are not interesting for SCD). But do I get the Steinway D, the Steinway B, the Bechstein, the Blüthner, the Grotrian or one of the other less famous alternatives? This is probably what's called a luxury problem.