telemanr wrote:That type of recording is really best used if you are using Hauptwerk in another church so that the acoustic of this church will be the only thing added to the sound coming from the speakers being used.
That was why Allen, when they first started sampling, did their recording in an anechoic chamber, the only way to get truly "dry" samples. No reverb in the recorded sound so the sounds would create their own reverb in the space they were to be played in. Also, no need for noise reduction and therefore no loss of quality from that process. Allen also did not use stereo for much the same reason, a single organ pipe is, in theory, a monophonic sound source (although on large pipes there might be some stereo separation of the sound coming from the pipe mouth and the top of the pipe). I sort of agree with that theory in one way, but on the other hand, a one rank pipe organ will 61 sound sources and I now think stereo imaging from a pair of speakers helps recreate that sound-space better.
Even recording the pipes with the mics in the chamber in a dry building, will leave some hint of acoustic influence from the space they were recorded in.
Basically that is the choice you have to make about whether you are trying to virtually re-create the sound of a particular instrument and its acoustic environment or if you are trying to create sounds that will give you a high quality pipe-like sound in some other environment other than the original location of the organ. I think the later is harder to achieve.
That raises a question to which I don't entirely know the answer. For me, until HW came along in its later forms, Allen had the best sound for me (I know for others it will be other brands) of the sampled instruments, although I could acknowledge its weaknesses (especially their reed sounds for some reason) Late generation Allens have very high quality samples and the playback of individual sounds and ranks and small combinations are quite convincing to me. However, I wonder why HW sounds better to me overall, Two possible reasons would be the note by note recordings, as opposed to making one sample serve for several notes (an economic necessity at one point I know) and the use of stereo over mono. Of course larger Allens with multiple channels sound better than the smaller two and four channel instruments. Also, Allen has always separated their audio by organ division, so even a 6 channel, three manual organ, only had two channels per division. I often wished they had allowed all channels to be used for the whole organ, much the HW allows you to. Does someone know of any other reasons HW is so successful in acheiving realistic sounding samples? I don't think it is the wind model entirely, because HW with the wind model turned off, still sounds better to my ears, and Allen has its own version of wind modelling.
John