Antoni Scott wrote:I used to live close to Allen organs in Macungie, Pa. so took the opportunity to visit every so often to see what the "latest" technology was. I always left disappointed and I'm not sure why.
When I first heard a Hauptwerk (it was the Metz), both the individual stops and the ensemble sounded much better. I'm not why, either. Is it because Hauptwerk sound samples are recordings or the actual pipe and other digital organs are synthesized sounds ?
Allens (and most other well-known organ brands) also use recorded samples of pipe organs. I suspect the differences lie in the number of samples per rank (Allen may only sample 2 or 3 notes per octave and use those to fill out the remaining notes) and processing of the recorded samples. Even now the entire sample set for an Allen organ will fit in megabytes worth of memory as opposed to Hauptwerk's use of gigabytes. This may have something to do with Allen's practice of continuing to use samples that were being used in instruments generations older as well as the desire for the very fast start-up times I mentioned earlier (from off to playing in under 10 seconds).