Electric church organs - integrating into sound systems

[TomHoward]

Afternoon all

We have a church installation that has an electric organ, which has 4x organ manufacturer speakers fitted. They are an unusual sized beast, a huge box with something like 1x18 and horn, rated at around 100W.

They are not rated for suspension and have need to sit on a shelf or structure.

 

The rev isn't happy with the presentation, and we are looking at refitting all the AV into the chapel anyway. It's against the manufacturer's recommendations, who would rather keep their own boxes, and possibly re-locate them, but does anyone have any experience please of running the electric organ into either a dedicated pro system, something with discreet woofers and tops, or integrating into a wider distributed system, perhaps again with subs?

 

Image of offending speakers for reference - it's hard to portray the scale of these things:

 

http://i66.tinypic.com/b9hxcg.jpg

[timsabre]

Oooo that's ugly!!!

 

There has been a previous thread discussing this

 

http://www.blue-room.org.uk/index.php?showtopic=65926

 

Basically the issue is that organ designers like to have as many channels of amp/speaker output as possible as they perceive that this gives the most clarity to the organ sound (getting as close as they can to one pipe per note as in the proper organ). Then they use dodgy home made speaker cab design with maplin amp modules and loads of piezo tweeters which kind of spoils the argument a bit.

 

So to do what you want (and the organ manufacturer will hate you) you will need to mix the multiple outputs to a single feed. Obviously you will need a capable pa with decent sub to reproduce it. We have done it in our church, the organ we've got just has 3 outputs (one for each manual) and the sound was vastly improved over the dodgy speakers that the organ manufacturer provided.

 

You need to make sure that the PA comes on with the organ and that the level is fixed. There is nothing an organist hates more than someone riding their levels.

[TomHoward]

Okay, cool.

I hadn't considered that the 4 outputs might be separately fed. They are all wired individually (in fetching 0.5mm bell wire) the 20m or so back to the organ, where amp modules are fitted inside, but I haven't tested to see whether all outputs are duplicated or whether they are filtered per section or something.

 

There's no sound desk or operator here so riding levels isn't a problem - there's organ, and then at the moment a separate 100V system with 1x lapel mic and 1x lectern mic. That gets turned on or off to operate (very little adjustment if any) and certainly no adjustment live.

 

Out of interest, what's considered a capable PA? Maybe a starting point would be for us to put one of our temporary systems into the chapel, we've got an HK L5 system we could use, just wire the organ into that and see how it goes.

 

I did speak to the organ manufacturer who said the system would be 'voiced' upon installation and may need 're-voicing' with calibration of the amplifier if the speakers were moved.

 

I think we'll get a decent organ player in, perhaps wire it into a temp system and see how it plays as to whether it's a non-starter. The technical knowledge of the organ manufacturer seems to be considered gospel but it seems very shaky.

[timsabre]

The technical knowledge of the organ manufacturer seems to be considered gospel but it seems very shaky.

 

This was my experience too. They refused to honour the service contract if we made any changes to the system but didn't understand about balanced audio (we wanted to take a line out into the sound system for a web broadcast).

 

By "capable" I mean not disco dave stuff, it's basically sinewaves so any nastiness will be obvious and there is a lot of very low frequency in the pedal section (though our organ turned out to be running through Carlsbro speakers when we got into the speaker enclosure).

Your HK should do well.

[richard_cooper]

The technical knowledge of the organ manufacturer seems to be considered gospel but it seems very shaky.

 

This was my experience too. They refused to honour the service contract if we made any changes to the system but didn't understand about balanced audio (we wanted to take a line out into the sound system for a web broadcast).

 

By "capable" I mean not disco dave stuff, it's basically sinewaves so any nastiness will be obvious and there is a lot of very low frequency in the pedal section (though our organ turned out to be running through Carlsbro speakers when we got into the speaker enclosure).

Your HK should do well.

 

I've got very similar experiences with organ manufacturers. Often insisting on their own cabinets that were really just cheap Chinese boxes. In our case with a cheap powered sub that "HAD" to be powered via this, until I found out......

 

http://s13.postimg.org/ql390mvtf/Organ_plug.jpg

 

The organ that we often had on hire looked like it was built internally from a collection of Velleman type amplifier kits screwed to a wooden shelf.

[sclg]

If I can add my tuppence worth as an organist and a (retired) electronic engineer...

 

While I accept the point about some manufacturers providing poor quality gear, any professional organist will fall about laughing at the idea that you can emulate a pipe organ through 2 channels and a subwoofer B-)

Pipe organs do not even begin to approximate to a point source and much of the 'real' effect comes from the interference patterns between pipes. Most of the time you are playing, you have anywhere between 4 or 5 and 30 independent sound sources. With too few channels, intermodulation distortion can be a huge problem. Normally, they will take a C C# approach which means that - particularly in the bass - alternate notes are sent to different channels.

There's also the problem of the different divisions of the organ. Even in a small one, the Great and the Swell will be quite a few feet apart and in a large one, it may be many tens of feet.

 

Even the apparently poor quality stuff may not be that important. If you have many channels, then each one will be handling a pretty limited range of frequencies and there are almost no HF transients to worry about.

At the LF end, if you have any 32 ft stops, then you do need something that will handle 16Hz!

 

I think it comes down to whether you want something that makes a vaguely organ-like sound or something that replicates a good pipe organ :)

 

(.. and don't dismiss "voicing" - it's fundamental to the organ builders art. Every pipe will be adjusted to fit in both in frequency and tone with all the others. Most electronic systems can do the same nowadays.)

 

Steve

[TomHoward]

Ours internally is certainly a bit of a collection of parts as well - it's modular MIDI sections and open chassis power supplies, amp modules etc, all combined and boxed up.

 

I'll investigate the source to the speakers to see whether it's filtered or a single source to all.

[Stuart91]

While I accept the point about some manufacturers providing poor quality gear, any professional organist will fall about laughing at the idea that you can emulate a pipe organ through 2 channels and a subwoofer B-)

 

Fair enough, but will the punters in the pews notice any difference?

 

(And they're ultimately the ones forking out the money for the gear)

[sclg]

While I accept the point about some manufacturers providing poor quality gear, any professional organist will fall about laughing at the idea that you can emulate a pipe organ through 2 channels and a subwoofer B-)

 

Fair enough, but will the punters in the pews notice any difference?

 

(And they're ultimately the ones forking out the money for the gear)

 

Some won't - but that's true of everything to do with music reproduction.

Should we provide crap quality just because some people don't notice or care......

[Stuart91]

Some won't - but that's true of everything to do with music reproduction.

Should we provide crap quality just because some people don't notice or care......

 

I'm inclined to agree with you, in general. However church organs seem to be in a class all of their own when it comes to overspend, and I'm not convinced that they're great value for money.

 

I've seen some small churches (200 seat room, maybe 75-100 in regular attendance) spend into six figures on an organ. Meanwhile £5k for a PA system is seen as an unnecessary extravagance. They persist with an utterly inadequate 100v line system and wonder why attendance continues to dwindle.

 

And as discussed further up the thread, some organ speakers are the equivalent of taking a furry disco speaker, slapping a badge on it, and charging L'Acoustic prices for it.

 

Also, apply the same thinking to almost any other instrument and it sounds like a ludicrous proposition. If a worship leader asked for £3k for a top of the line acoustic guitar, in all but a very small minority of churches, they'd get laughed out the room. If we applied the organ principle to everything else, most churches would be almost instantly bankrupt. So why are they a special case?

[timsabre]

I play the organ at my church and I agree with Stuart. I think if the organ is for church accompaniment of hymns the requirements are much less than if it's going to be used for recitals etc where the accuracy of sound will be much more important.

Of course some churches do both and then it is a tradeoff. But I've been involved in the speccing of a few digital organs and they do talk a lot of guff about their speaker systems, it's a bit like dealing with hifi buffs.

[Yorkie]

Interesting stuff this... Our church has just started looking for £2.5M to overhaul and extend its existing buildings, on the shopping list will be a digital organ and top end PA (likely d&b). I've spent a little while this afternoon reading online about various digital organs now available, I can see the argument that having the organ through the mixer enables fiddling but surely if the speakers are in the right place, such an instrument could have its various channels fed into the system processor before the amps? I'm genuinely intrigued as to what loudspeaker system they're using to reproduce 16Hz

[sam.spoons]

You can bet it ain't those boxes in the OP....

[chelgrian]

I'm genuinely intrigued as to what loudspeaker system they're using to reproduce 16Hz

 

http://www.thebuttkicker.com/pro-audio ?

 

Conventional subs are mostly only good down to 20Hz and even then the roll off is going to be huge.

[timsabre]

Not many organs have 32ft stops, usually 16ft is the lowest. If you go round a big cathedral you can often see the 32ft pipes at the sides of the organ casing, they look like missile launchers...