This has turned into a rather interesting topic and I always like to hear what others are experiencing. A couple things.... First, the mention I see quite often of the 'mixing in the air' and I guess I look at it differently. My take is that unless you are in a very large room / church, etc., I really can't agree that most of us are actually achieving any real mixing in the air, that takes some room to do and as it has been said,
the best stop on an organ is the room it is in. As mentioned, there's going to be room interaction no matter what, and depending on how close you position yourself to your speakers this will also vary to a greater or lesser extent. At best, I feel most of us are simulating 'mixing in the air' to one extent or another and are not truly achieving real mixing in the air, such as in the example of my paltry 12' x 12' rather dead acoustical space. Their ain't a whole lot of mixing going on.
For those of us who have been on the forum here for quite sometime (myself included), some likely know (and have read) I have posted several times about various speaker placements, arrangements, audio routing configurations and so on I have tried over the years, so many different ones I've literally lost count, but I recall the outcome of many.
Yes, if you're close enough to a real organ you can hear the left and right of the pipes, if that's what you want to produce in your setting I know of 2 ways. Either have enough speakers placed to the left and right to set them up in groups to use one of Hauptwerk's algorithms, or do it yourself by choosing where you want things to go when you first load the organ. If you really wanted to attempt to get accurate to the real thing, the sample set producer would supply a chart of the organ case showing where in the case the various pipes are located, then you'd arrange your speakers in such a manner related to the case / pipe layout to route the ranks to those speakers, the number of speakers needed to accomplish this is definitely in question. The problem with this type of arrangement is you would end up with speakers in various locations closer and further apart, higher and lower, etc., and I'd fear it would totally ruin the stereo image as I have tried such arrangements in the past and is exactly what I experienced, a very odd sounding stereo image, let's just say it wasn't good and leave it at that.
Now, the issue with one single pair of speakers regardless of up close to you or not and how good of quality or not is as others have mentioned, the more stops you pile on, the worse the clarity gets, stops get lost in the mix as they get overtaken by others, and again I have also experienced this and no quality of speaker will correct this as we're simply asking the speakers to do too much all at once. As I've reported in the past, the best speaker layout I've found is when they are stacked on top of each other vertically to the left and right of the console in fairly close proximity to me, and the stacks being around 5 or so feet apart. Too close together and you lose some of the stereo image, too far apart and you have a hole in the middle, this is subject to a bit of tweaking of spacing between stacks for best results. 6 or more channels is what you're going to want.
The next thing then is, how do we route the audio? After several configurations including using the algorithms, I first discovered using 6 channels up front (and you could go to 8 or more if you'd like and got the room) that sending divisions to each pair sounded pretty good. This alleviated
some of the muddy sound and loss of clarity when adding stops but not all of it and there was still something missing. I got to thinking about how various stops of different timbre might clash, especially when we're asking those different sounding stops to sound through the same speakers. In a real organ case we don't mix flutes and trumpets together in a row right next to each other, they're separated from each other and are in families if you will, so this got me to thinking, how about if I treat it the same way when I route the audio? My theory was since I don't have enough speakers for each pipe which would be a ridiculous amount of speakers, not to mention the audio equipment to support such an arrangement, that it would probably work well to send similar sounding ranks to the same pairs of speakers, put them in families so to speak, and in this case we are at least not asking very dissimilar sounding ranks to compete with each other over the same speakers. This arrangement for me has resulted in by far the most realism and clarity, clarity alone was upped 50%. It also produced the least amount of harshness and clashing, and seems to do the best in simulating the mixing in the air phenomena. Is there more to make yet a further improvement, I don't know, I'm still pondering options but haven't made any further attempts as it generally involves a rather lengthy tear down, last one took me all of a Saturday, so I'm going to have to be well convinced of my next idea before I try it.
Unless it's a dry set and as mentioed you
are simply building an organ in your space, the only option I see at this point is headphones.
Marc