Organ matters - Organs matter!

David,

Much of what you say rings true.  Many digital organs, or should I say digital organ installs do not have a "WOW" factor.  Generally this is due to too few audio channels, poor amplification, mediocre speakers, poor placement of speakers, and poor setup and voicing.  To add to the misery of a lot of digital organs, they are put in rooms with unfortunate acoustics.  Even so, if everything lines up right for the digital organ, I find they still fall short of a fine pipe organ.  I believe part of it has to do with the way speakers propagate sound.  It is fundamentally different from air moving through a pipe.

You mention the flue chorus as being quite realistic, but the big manual reeds being uninspired.  This is generally the case with digitals, as speakers tend to compress the sound somewhat, and when you put a fistful  of notes through one speaker such as harmonically rich reeds, there is significant phase summing and cancellations, thus giving a nondescript result with a sonic glare which tells you it is electronic.

I don't know what the state of the electronic organ marketplace is like in the UK, but I do know that in North America, people are more concerned about low price, number of keyboards, number of stops, etc. than in the use of good audio  and good tonal results.

And generally results are mediocre.

Getting back to your post, you don't mention enough facts to know whether what you heard was the organ's fault, the installation, etc.  Was this a recent model?  Was it a permanent installation?  Was the setup designed to sell product?

AV

Hi,

A few things here.

I think you actually mean Trinity Wall Street, Episcopal Church.  Not Lutheran.

I went to NYC in 2004 and played this instrument, and also heard it played by others.  The instrument is absolutely stunning.  It was a revelation to me in how much better it was than any other electronic organ I had heard. 

From pipe organ fanatics, no electronic organ was supposed to ever sound this good, or be installed in a church such as Trinity Wall Street.  TWS is among the wealthiest parishes on the planet, and could cut a cheque for any kind of pipe organ they wanted.  But they decided on an M&O.

What makes the M&O electronic organ different are the following,
1) tone generation, using industrial strength PCs, means no compromise, as computing power is enormous.
2) every note of every stop has long samples (longer than 10 seconds), and done in stereo
3) has blower and action noise - done very nicely
4) huge audio system - over 80 audio channels
5) installed by musicians - both Marshall and Ogletree are concert level organists

The result is a superb instrument.  I am not surprised that TWS is keeping it.

Another American company, Walker Technical also makes wonderful, truly superior instruments.

The Hauptwerk program with it's sample sets is in some ways similar to the M&O, in that it uses long samples, PCs, etc., so theoretically  can offer results close to M&O.

And by the way, the M&O in Trinity Wall Street, actually sounds better in the church than on recordings.  It is an instrument all organ lovers should make a pilgrimage to go and see.

AV 

Dragonser,

The connection between Rodgers and Roland, is that Rodgers is a wholly owned subsiduary of Roland.  The technology inside a Rodgers organ is all Roland.  The Rodgers factory makes most of the classical organs, except for the 500 series organs which are made by Roland in Europe.  The Rodgers factory also assembles Roland digital pianos, those destined for the North American market.

The Royal V, a 5 manual like the one in Carnegie Hall, did end up in Japan, and I do think the Rodgers company reburbished it a few years ago into a digital instrument.

AV

David,

I don't know if that particular You Tube video is the best example of what the Dutch call "live" wind, but it definitely is not poor winding as in "wind sag".

"Live wind" produces a rather elastic tuning of the instrument, more so than a large pitch dip.  The Dutch would say that it makes the organ sound alive and interesting.

Most digital organs sound too static, as far as the ensemble goes.  Some emulate the winding better than others.  Generally when I install an electronic organ, I leave the wind pressure setting on low, so it is not totally static.  If there is a tracker response, I leave it on as well. 

With digital organs, I tend to set things up as discretely as possible.  As soon as one hears major pitch sag, or loud chiff, or overly barky reeds, it quickly becomes annoying, much more so than with real pipes.  In other words moderation is the key with these pipe organ effects.

With Hauptwerk, the wind modelling is done very well.  For baroque instruments it makes them sound very authentic.

AV

Rob,

I am new to this forum, and so hope I am not sticking my nose where it don't belong.

I am a service technician from Canada, and recently worked on a Johannus Opus 1110.  I am not sure how close your model and the 1110 are related, but the stop list and Opus # would mean they are contemporaries.   I totally transformed the sound of the instrument, after the church had the organ for about 18 years.  The were had, twice, first by salesman/installer of the instrument, and secondly about a year ago by a local sound man who didn't know what he was doing concerning the organ.  The organ also misbehaved occasionally.

I won't bother the forum with the whole story, but here is how it stands,

1) the organ which has 5 audio channels has 2 Yamaha BR12 speakers, 2 Yamaha BR10 speakers, and a re-used plywood box with a quality 15" woofer installed in it.  The reason for the Yamaha speakers is that the sound guy put in 2 Yamaha BR12 speakers (he thought the organ was a single channel organ duplicated 5 times) which were wired in parallel.  Obviously the organ only sounded about 25% thru the external speakers, the rest through the mediocre internal speakers.  The previous speakers totally crappy PA speakers, looked to be from the 50s.

2) I balanced the channels as best as possible.  It ended up being balanced quite nicely.

3) rest of the wok included some re-work on the pedalboard, and finding a cruddy power supply connector.

The organ now sounds like it is fulfilling it's potential - really quite decent, better than some more recent stuff I have come across.

To sort out the audio in relation to it's channeling, I suggest the following,
1) take the back off the organ
2) remove one wire from each speaker (make sure it doesn't short to anything)
3) turn off the reverb
4) go thru each stop - the stops that sound go thru that channel
5) some stops go thru more than one channel, for instance the lowest notes of the Gt. Bourdon goes thru the bass channel.  Some of the manual reed stops go thru 2 channels and are split in C-C# fashion.
6) go thru each speaker this way.

To get the organ to sound right thru external speakers - the mid and treble speakers must have a similar tonality.  The bass is sort of different, but a good setup will get you to the lowest C on the Pedal Subass.

I hope I have been helpful here.

If they hadn't had the sound guy's solution installed a year, I probably would have done something differently, but even so, the result of I did, astounded everybody who heard it.

Why is it that so many in the organ business, and so many purchasers think that speakers and their placement is so unimportant in the musical result  of an organ install.  Sounds like things in England are no different from Canada.

AV