Frequently Asked Questions

With one exception, all musical instruments are essentially a fixed size, generating a fixed amount of sound. That exception is the organ, the "King of Instruments". The organ is the ONLY musical instrument that is designed and built to generate the type and amount of sound appropriate for the room in which it is to live. If you want a single musical instrument that will fill a large room with music, the only option is an organ.

A fine musical instrument such as a piano, violin, guitar, drum, etc. is a device that produces a very pleasing sound. Such instruments emanate sound in all directions. All that sound is reflected by surfaces in the room until it reaches your ears.

When you mic (or otherwise amplify) an acoustic instrument, you can only pick up and amplify a tiny bit of the overall sound that the instrument emanates. A high-end amplication system will produce a better sound than a lower-end one by having a better frequency range and lower distortion. However, it is impossible to amplify that omnidirectional quality that is a key element of the beauty of an acoustic instrument. As a result, the amplified sound can be very tiring and even somewhat irritating.

This is not the case with an organ. An organ can generate a wide variety of tone from many more sound sources than an acoustic instrument. Through being able to vary the tone quality, an organist can give the impression of a louder sound without actually increasing the volume correspondingly. Also through having more sound sources, the organ can create more of the multi-directional quality of an acoustic instrument. The organ inherently has more capacity to fill the room with a pleasing sound than any other instrument.

Electronic pianos (other than electronic organs) are not designed to reproduce enough of the real sound of a piano to fill a large room. They too must be amplified and that is no better (if not worse) than amplifying a real piano.

No. Just as an electronic piano is not an amplified acoustic piano, an electronic organ is not an amplified pipe organ. Electronic organs use a completely different system of sound generation that is intended to sound like a pipe organ. However, like a pipe organ, an electronic organ should be configured with the type and amount of sound appropriate for the room in which it is to live.

A pipe organ is designed with appropriate quantities, sizes and types of stops to suit the needs of the room in which the organ is to live. With a pipe organ, except in cases where stops are unified, every note of every stop is generated by a separate sound source, namely an organ pipe. With a pipe organ, there are hundreds if not thousands of sound sources.

Each organ pipe is an acoustic instrument and as such makes a complex, omnidirectional sound. Each pipe is a unique sound source. As an acoustic instrument, each pipe emanates its own complex sound. What you hear is a combination of all the complex sound emanating from all the sources.

How complex? Here is a modest example. If you had 20 stops selected and were to play an 8-note chord, 160 pipes would sound. You would hear a blend (an acoustic blend) of 160 complex sounds reflecting off the surfaces of the room.

For electronic organs, the sound sources are the speakers. Many notes can be fed to a single speaker. However, what emanates from the speaker is only one sound that the audio channel driving the speaker has blended as the mathematical sum of all notes and tones being fed to it. If you were to play the same 8-note chord on 20 stops of an electronic organ equipped with 16 audio channels, you would hear an acoustic blend of sound from an absolute maximum of 16 sources. That is a far cry from the 160 equivalent of the pipe organ.

The mathematical summing of the sound is a major reason why an electronic organ may still sound "electronic". For a more realistic electronic reproduction of the complex, omnidirectional sound of a pipe organ, the mathematical summing of the organ sounds must be minimized. The solution is to feed as few simultaneous notes as possible through each audio channel. The only way to do that is to provide as many audio channels as space and money will allow.

When sound waves intersect, they combine, creating, in effect, a new sound. You are not likely to notice this if the intersecting waves are substantially different from each other. However, if the intersecting waves are the same, then the resulting harmonic spectrum can be substantially different from the orginals and this you are likely to notice. Furthermore, what you hear will vary if you change position.

With a pipe organ, there are so many sounds bouncing around that the combining of the sounds has little or no effect on the sound quality. In an electronic organ, there are relatively few sound sources so the effect of the intersecting of the waves from those sources is more noticeable. However, if you have 2 (or more) speakers producing exactly the same sound, the combination of the waves from the 2 speakers may be quite different from the originals and will sound somewhat unlike a pipe organ.

The basic rule of thumb of electronic organ is that the same sound should never emanate from more than one speaker. Ideally, the basic tonal features of an electronic organ should be designed starting with the speaker requirements of the room. Once it is understood what speakers are required, the tone-generation equipment can be determined and then what stops it should generate.

Technically, the reason for buying an institutional organ is because it is the only musical instrument that on its own can adequately meet the musical needs of a larger room for live music. However, in general, the organ is something everyone should like. One should never condem the instrument in general due to a few bad experiences.

We have found that when people do not like the sound of an organ, there are two basic possible reasons: one is the organ itself and the other is what or how the organist is playing. However, many people today are not familiar enough with organs, and what is involved to play them, to distinguish between the two causes. This leads to inappropriate assessment of the instrument in general.

The organ: The organ is the largest, most complex and expensive of musical instruments. Because of this, there are many reasons why an organ may not sound very good. Compromises made in the design of an organ due to space or financial limitations have implications for the life of the instrument if nothing is ever done to resolve them. Improper or inadequate maintenance will lead to deterioation of the quality and usefulness of an organ, especially a pipe organ. Something often overlooked is that tastes in sound may have been quite different when the organ was built than they are today. Today the potential for a new organ to sound good, or for an old organ to be given new life, has increased dramatically in the past 20 years, mostly through significant advances in electronic technology

The organist: As with the organ itself, there are many reasons why the music being played does not appeal to the audience. Indeed, organists do not always choose to play what people would choose to hear, and there are reasons for that. One is that it is quite possible that the music that is being played was chosen because of limitations with the organ, and thus on a different organ, that same organist might play very different music. One should not forget that a piece of music played by one organist might sound quite different when played by another organist. Strictly speaking, organ music should be entertaining but it does depend upon things such as the quality and features of the organ available to the organist. Provide a better organ and you are likely to hear better music.

Organs are the only musical instrument that can be tailored to suit the room in which they are installed. Since every room is different, so must be every organ, from different specifications and features to different adjustments (voicing). Therefore, the cost to install any organ depends on what is needed for the organ to sound good in its destination. This applies to all organs, whether they are based on stock models such as those from Ahlborn Galanti or are custom-built.

Probably. The trade-in value depends on what it would take to make the old organ useful to a new owner.

Because the electronic technology in organs has improved so dramatically over the past 30 years, the cost of fine new instruments has come down considerably, but correspondingly the trade-in value of older instruments also has been reduced. This is due mainly to possibility of older components being undependable and to the poorer tonality in general of older instruments as compare to those of more recent technology.

Possibly. We have upgraded many old organs that have good-quality consoles. However, this is a complex matter. It would be best to give us a call.

Something to note about this is that when you are buying a new instrument, the better quality the console you buy, the more likely it is you will be able to upgrade the organ at a later date. Furthermore, when buying a new organ (pipe or electronic), it is also a good idea to provide extra space on the console for controls that you might want to add at a later date. Frequently, small upgrades or enhancements to organs are complicated by the fact that there is no room on the console to put the devices (drawknobs, tabs, indicators, etc.) necessary to to control the additional stops or features.