08-02-2023, 05:18 PM
Lucien - Whether there's any element of telepathy involved, I doubt - I prefer coincidence as an explanation for the impeccable timing!
Electronic organ speakers are an intriguing topic. Having indicated that the FTH organ speakers were located in the orchestra reflector because that's where the sound seemed to originate and there were visible grilles, I'm not confident of exactly which of those speaker units served the organ and which were fed from the hall PA - or indeed whether the organ speakers were visible at all. The generator spec sheet indicates that plenty of high frequencies were originated but I wonder how much of that brilliance was heard by the audience. Your mention of different approaches to artificial reverberation and rotating speakers is interesting and indicative of unsolved problems. As a past student of acoustics, and having once upon a time tinkered with relocating one or two pipe organs, I've always been interested in the directional characteristics of musical instruments and their interaction with the hall acoustics. By way of illustration, the most expensive seats in the middle balcony of the Free Trade Hall were notorious for providing the listener with an unbalanced earful of trombones, whereas the overall experience in some stalls seats suggested a need for serious bass cut and treble boost. The audiophile's search for realism raises the question: which is the real sound that you want to hear?
A pipe organ presumably radiates more or less as many different polar diagrams as it has pipes, and airflow turbulence presumably ensures phase incoherence between the various notes. The polar diagram of a pipe organ mixture stop must be highly complex and randomly varying. I guess that providing a speaker system for an electronic organ to mimic the complex directionality of a thousand or two pipes might cost as much as the pipe organ itself! I'm way out of date on electronic organs: maybe advances have been made recently in this area of the technology.
Thanks anyway for your interesting account of the fate of the FTH Compton instrument.
Martin
Electronic organ speakers are an intriguing topic. Having indicated that the FTH organ speakers were located in the orchestra reflector because that's where the sound seemed to originate and there were visible grilles, I'm not confident of exactly which of those speaker units served the organ and which were fed from the hall PA - or indeed whether the organ speakers were visible at all. The generator spec sheet indicates that plenty of high frequencies were originated but I wonder how much of that brilliance was heard by the audience. Your mention of different approaches to artificial reverberation and rotating speakers is interesting and indicative of unsolved problems. As a past student of acoustics, and having once upon a time tinkered with relocating one or two pipe organs, I've always been interested in the directional characteristics of musical instruments and their interaction with the hall acoustics. By way of illustration, the most expensive seats in the middle balcony of the Free Trade Hall were notorious for providing the listener with an unbalanced earful of trombones, whereas the overall experience in some stalls seats suggested a need for serious bass cut and treble boost. The audiophile's search for realism raises the question: which is the real sound that you want to hear?
A pipe organ presumably radiates more or less as many different polar diagrams as it has pipes, and airflow turbulence presumably ensures phase incoherence between the various notes. The polar diagram of a pipe organ mixture stop must be highly complex and randomly varying. I guess that providing a speaker system for an electronic organ to mimic the complex directionality of a thousand or two pipes might cost as much as the pipe organ itself! I'm way out of date on electronic organs: maybe advances have been made recently in this area of the technology.
Thanks anyway for your interesting account of the fate of the FTH Compton instrument.
Martin
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