Allen MDC 20 home organ

[Echoes]

Tonight I went and looked at an Allen MDC 20 console organ, circa 1979/80.
The build was quite nice with clean, simple, sensible interior electronics layout. But honestly, neither soundwise, effectwise nor volumewise was I impressed or taken by it. Perhaps a small but real Gyrosonic inside would have made a big difference.
The owner's manual did have a funny disclaimer along the lines of... "your home is not St. Paul's Cathedral, so don't expect this organ to sound like it in your small room" (sic).

Anyway, on the bottom back of the organ was a pair of unlabelled 1/4" jacks. Anyone know if they are stereo outs? Just curious. Even the original owners manual didn't specify. Seperate headphone out is on front of organ.

[sadatoni]

The MDC line was the low end of Allen organs at the time. They were, as the ads at the time said, "Low prices are only half of it...Modified Digital Computer (MDC) tone generation, by Allen, replaces the 'jungle maze' of parts and wiring found in many organs, with a single lightweight plug-in microcircuit board that packs tremendous music power." (from an ad in the November 1979 Sheet Music magazine)

It didn't sound as good as the MOS-1 organs of the time.

I've no idea what the jacks are for.

[gsneide]

I used to have one of these. The jacks are external speaker jacks. IIRC, one is for the great and pedal, the other for swell.

[Echoes]

Thanks guys.
Modified Digital Computer explains why I couldn't figure out what/where the tone generator when I looked inside from the top!

I looked at it on Dec 23. It was on cl as an Allen organ for $60. I advised him to rewrite his ad and include more info such as model#, etc, and informed him there was no great demand for this as well as most home organs whether working or not (his seemed to be in fine working and cosmetic order.
Next day, the 24th, he re--written the ad and dropped the price to $50.
Today, the 25th, he now lists it for free!
Honestly, there was absolutely no personality or charachter as far as tbe tone goes.
Still, I hope he finds a greatful and willing taker who wants it for playing/practice. I hate to see any organ taken to the curb as happens to so many of them anymore.

Any recommended Allen home console, church sound models of the 60's or 70 70's that I should be aware of of worth considering should I happen to see one available?

[circa1949]

Glad you passed on it. At least he wasn't offering it for a pie in the sky price like $2000. IMHO, these models are, as you've determined, practically useless. The search tool of this website seems poor at honing in on posts about the MDC-20, for some reason, but you'd have found several prior threads about the extreme limitations and dead-sterile sound of those organs.

Here's how I'd rank the Allen models from worst to best - slightly weighting (20% perhaps) overall flexibility too, like ease of adding MIDI - based on having heard all of these variants at least by recording, many in person, and having owned a few. And having participated in way too many discussions about them here!


MDC
single "rank" analog (T12, T15)
single computer, early MOS
mid-sized multi-rank analog (TC1, TC3)
mid sized 2 computer MOS, MOS-2
smallest MADC organs w/o card reader
huge multi-rank analog (TC6, 7...custom models like the one Dell Anderson made a video of: <cite>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuVcJAGR4eI</cite> ) These are time consuming to maintain, if nothing else.
huge multi-computer MOS (Potentially very expensive to maintain)
mid-sized MADC organs w/card reader; small full cage ADC organs
smallest MDS models, smallest Protege models whether Renn. or MDS technology
big full-cage/multi-cage ADC, particularly late ones
mid to large sized MDS
mid sized Renaissance
Anything current that's got >= 4 audio channels

People might flip any two that are close by of course. By putting a huge ADC above the very smallest 2 channel Renaissance tech organs, I'm underscoring that IMHO, in a church setting especially, you simply can't get around the improved ensemble that comes from multiple, separate audio channels.

[jbird604]

Circa,

Interesting lineup. I rather agree with your rankings, though I'd probably put the T-12 as the poorest instead of the MDC. I know it's possible to make good music even on the T-12, but it was rather dishonest to put all those stop names on the rail when they were nothing but various flute combinations. People were always astounded to find that after putting on the String Diapason 8 in the great there was not any other stop that would add anything to it!

The MDC line was indeed an odd offering from Allen at the time they were promoting the superiority of their digital organs. MDC organs are of course digital, having no analog tone generators, but rather limited in tone color, having only three truly distinct tone colors that are unified and duplexed around at various pitch levels and divisions.

However, in the poor organ's defense I might say that they offered a good value at the time. For about the price of a T-12 one could have a genuine digital organ with realistic-sounding principals, flutes, strings, and reeds at all the essential pitches. No couplers, no mixtures, not even any mutations in the first version, but in many ways there was about as much organ as previously offered in a TC-3 for example, without the maintenance issues of analog.

The most dreadful things about the MDC series (in my opinion) were the celeste effect and the carillon stop. I say this because (having been an Allen salesman at the time) I got more complaints involving those features than anything else. Not that these effects sounded bad, they didn't, but because of the way they ate up the organ's resources.

Turning on the celeste effect produced a beautiful authentic celeste by causing each key to produce two simultaneous notes, one at normal pitch and the other at a slightly sharp pitch, just right to produce the perfect celestes we'd come to expect from the large multi-computer MOS organs. Problem was that the organ had the standard 12-note-at-a-time limitation of all early Allen digitals, and when playing celeste effect, this limit was reached with only six keys down. If you played full two-hand chords and tried to play a pedal you'd probably discover the pedal would not sound. I heard this complaint quite often.

The carillon was also quite decent-sounding, though it had an odd step-by-step decay. Big issue -- the system used five separate pitches to create the carillon tone, so playing just one note at a time would use up five of the 12 available key slots. Since the sound had sustain, it lingered long enough that you were frequently tying up 10 of the 12 slots just by playing a melody line on the carillon. That left only two more notes available, so it was nearly impossible to play along with the carillon on the other manual or to add a pedal line. The absolute worst case was trying to use the celeste on the swell while playing the carillon on the great. Sounded just horrible, like a complete system failure.

If I could convince an owner to simply never use the carillon under any circumstances, or to use it only to chime the hour slowly, most complaints went away. If I could get them to use the celeste effect sparingly and to be careful not to exceed the keying limit, they were satisfied with it.

I know of at least one medium-size church that has the largest MDC (the 52) and is sounds great. With a suitable external audio system in a lively acoustic setting, it can be quite agreeable, in fact very pleasing. I'd miss having mixtures if I had to play one regularly, and I'd long for more solo reeds and useful celestes. And the five blind presets are not very useful. But just for accompanying hymns using the 8-4-2 foundations and the occasional chorus reed, it's not bad at all.

I agree with you about the audio channels too. I'd rather have an ADC or MDS with four or more channels than to have the latest entry level model with only two channels.

[circa1949]

I know it's possible to make good music even on the T-12, but it was rather dishonest to put all those stop names on the rail when they were nothing but various flute combinations.

True but I had a T15B and an MDC-20, and I can tell you the T15B with the gyro spinning sounded a heck of a lot warmer than the MDC was ever going to sound. I thought I would be "upgrading" when a digital organ showed up in the Washington Post classifieds. I shouldn't have bothered. Luckily I sold the T15B for the same price I bought the MDC for. Sheesh. If only I'd put my babysitting and lawn mowing money into Apple stock back then...I'd be buying myself a brand new Renaissance organ these days!