Paramount 450 Musette Noises

I just installed the Paramount 450 and am just starting to fine tune for my environment. The Musette voice has a very loud clunking noise on various notes in the 3rd and 4th octave, especially C4. This organ has been around a while, so I'm wondering if anyone else has encountered this issue.

I’ve just checked and my set is the same. I don’t think it’s anything to do with pipe speech – more likely the valve mechanism at the foot of those pipes. This would seem an obvious case for sample stretching – substituting a sample with better speech and transposing it. There seem to be two approaches to this sort of problem – in Hauptwerk the tradition is to sample an organ “warts and all” – only correcting a sample if the sound is very wrong; whereas companies like Allen aim for more even voicing throughout. I can see that minor variations in tone add life to a rank, but I often wish Hauptwerk's sample makers would tidy things up a bit more. As the Musette is one of the less used ranks I can only suggest that you omit it from your registrations.

I see that you’re from Mesa Arizona, so presumably you’re well acquainted with the wonderful Wurlitzer in the Organ Stop Pizza? I’d love to hear – and play – that organ; there’s nothing quite so huge in England! I particularly enjoy the way it was played by the late Charlie Balogh.

We are fortunate to live about 20 minutes from Organ Stop. We've been going there for years. I agree that the organ should sound realistic and not over-processed. But this noise makes me reluctant to use this rank. If I knew more about the process I might try to correct the problem some day.

Here's the response I received from Paramount:

"As you probably know, “noises” are a part of most organs and although sometimes unwanted, tend to add to the charm of ageing instruments. Our samples are recorded “as-is” and only altered to remove any recording artefacts, so any “clunks” are in the original instrument at the time of recording.

The only thing I can suggest is to use Hauptwerk’s built-in facilities to ’tailor’ those octaves to suit your requirement."