NickNelson wrote:So can I as a technical exercise, though presumably the answer will turn out to be horribly expensive. However, I'm struggling to see what the musical justification would be. Would the effect of 32,768 pipes and reverberation tails sounding together actually sound nice?
Consider trying to reproduce the Wanamaker Organ, which is perhaps the largest operational pipe organ in the USA. The Wanamaker Organ has 28,500 pipes installed, with over 7,000 pipes in its string organ alone. "Commanding these huge resources is a massive console with six ivory keyboards and 729 color-coded stop tablets. There are 168 piston buttons under the keyboards and 42 foot controls. The console weighs 2.5 tons; the entire instrument weighs 287 tons." At what point would it make more sense to use multiple computers in parallel, rather than trying to use a single computer to do all functions. But if you chose to use multiple computers, dividing the workload on Divisional or such logical lines, you still have the problem of dealing with inter-divisional couplers, combination systems, etc.
Of course the cost of the computers and Hauptwerk software would be the smallest part. A much greater cost would come from the tremendous number of audio channels, amplifiers, and speakers that would be required to convert those waveforms, reverbs tails, etc., into music. Not to mention the cost of creating a custom console that would let the musician control the organ.