Most of my pianos samples were played back on a Kurzweil K150. At the time, this device was quite clever - it used additive sine waves to simulate a piano. Pressing an individual note did in fact sound like a piano! But it had a couple of bugs.
One was that, for me, for playing fast ragtime, the pedal programming had a bug where if you hit a note, then the pedal, then lifted the note quite quickly, it made a truly horrible squaking sound. Of course this happens a lot when playing stride piano when hitting the bass notes.
The other problem was that it does not in fact have enough sine waves to sound like a real piano. Each note had 16 sine waves available, with a total of 240 sine waves available (so 16 notes at a time, if you didn't really use all 16 sine waves? What an odd number.). And so it has a kind of bell tone to it because it is missing some of the higher harmonics.
I played the version of Maple Leaf Rag below in June 2003 on the K150. I guess one noteworthy thing is it forced me to play (mostly) without the pedal! But you can hear the bell-like sound because 16 sine waves is not quite enough.
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