Compton CL72 - what was it?

[Lucien Nunes]

Rather an obscure question but somebody might just know...
Around the late 60s, Compton marketed a home spinet organ with the model number CL72. This should arouse suspicion, because it's just not like an ordinary Compton model number. The 72 could be an allusion to 1972 as many Compton numbers included two digits of the launch year, but it doesn't seem to marry up. More surprising yet is that the voicing is controlled by drawbars. To the best of my knowledge, no other Compton product had drawbars. So... was the CL72 a rebadged electronic made by someone else, and not a Compton Electrone at all?

BTW anyone interested in Compton Electrones can find lots of new material on my site at http://www.electrokinetica.org/d8/1/index.php

Lucien

[Alex]

Lucien, the Compton section on the website is amazing!  Thanks for an evening's enjoyment.

[Lucien Nunes]

Thanks for your interest and encouragement Alex, I will try to keep the momentum up and add a page or so per week, although I fear even at that rate it will be a long process! I'm trying to track down a pic of the CL72 in the meantime...

Lucien

[Bobbell9]

Most of the Compton Melotones had the individual stops made up of differing amounts of the harmonics engraved on the rotors. This is very similar to the way that Hammond organs work and if a more or less sinusoidal set of harmonics was available engraved on the rotors a drawbar organ was feasible.

[Lucien Nunes]

True enough, however what is significant about the CL72 is that in over 30 years of making electric organs, Compton had never yet produced anything with drawbars. They knew it was possible and Wally Fair had at Acton a self-contained remote voicing control box with what amounts to 21-step drawbars used for testing and voicing new stops. Yet in their advertising they went to some pains to point out the advantages, to an organist, of sticking with the tried and tested method of registration using ordinary recognisable stops. Whether this was due to Hammond's patents on the drawbar system, a way of distinguishing the Electrone from the 'imported' competition, or simply inertia (an attribute that seems to have held back the Electrone despite JHC's typically forward-looking approach) I don't know.

Compton did not make great inroads into the low-cost home organ market. Their production methods and underlying design were more suited to making church organs such as the successful 357, 363, CH/2 models. Their main contenders against the solid-state electronics in the late 1960s were the models HE/ 1, 2 & 3 all of which share the standard stop tab voicing system, with more or less additional gimmicks. The CL72 appears to break the mould, even the model number does not sound like a Compton number. I have not seen one nor do I know of any survivors, hence my question - does anybody know what was inside it?

Lucien

[Bobbell9]

Compton's even produced an immensely heavy 88 note electronic piano in the late 1970.