Baldwin Multi Waveform Organ

[rjsilva]

If you could post some photos and maybe even make a recording that’d be interesting to some of us.

[spharorgan]

I’ll definitely take some pictures! Anything specific? I do not play so getting a recording will only happen if the organist meets me there after the repairs are finished

[rjsilva]

I was just thinking to hear the sound of it. It need not be a piece of music, just some demos of the stops. Single notes up and down or simple chords would be fine.

[MarkS]

Try this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjHjIKNWMHE

[jbird604]

Very interesting! The sound is so good you have to wonder why they didn't sell a great many of them. To answer my own question though -- they were probably very costly, perhaps there was a considerable waiting time to get one, and the optical/mechanical nature of the generator system made it fairly complicated and thus prone to troubles.

While this system may have arguably produced even better sound than the Allen MOS organs of the day, digital technology continued to evolve and eventually eclipsed this sound, and did so without the drawbacks of high cost, long waits, and unreliable hardware.

But these organs definitely made a point and proved a concept. No one could hear one and continue to doubt that electronic systems were indeed capable of producing very authentic and realistic pipe tones. And that old-fashioned analog tone generation was on its way out, to be replaced by some kind of record and playback technology.

[MarkS]

The Baldwin salesperson told me that they started at $50K--a lot of money then. A rumor circulated that Baldwin was to feature one of these at an AGO convention with Robert Glasgow performing and the organ would not work!

Nothing came close tonally until Allen introduced the Classic I and related custom digitals.

[spharorgan]

Here is a picture of the front and rear of the console

- - - Updated - - -

Here are pics of the Equipment Rack

[spharorgan]

close up of the waveform drum

[jbird604]

Wow! I am so intrigued by this, I just bought a service manual from Robert Spoon on the Multi-Wave. Sadly, the service manual does not contain any info about "how the organ works." Just schematics of all the boards and some general wiring diagrams.

Your pics help me somewhat to understand the concept, though I'm still unclear on how the tones are produced. Looking at the drums, it would appear that the different footages have their own sets of exciter lamps, and presumably, pickups. Then, I guess the spinning disk has the wave forms in optical film form.

Wish there was one somewhere nearby that I could look at. You'd think, right here in Arkansas where they were built, but I sure don't know of any. I understand that only 15 were ever built and only one or two are still working.

[Admin]

I thought I had some pictures of the Baldwin disk somewhere, but perhaps I was thinking of Welte. Here's some pictures of how Welte did it back in 1936.


Baldwin wasn't the first to use optical waveforms, as the Welte example from 1936 illustrates, but I think it was the last. There are many challenges to pulling this off. First it is necessary to somehow transcribe the waveform to a circular glass disk so it not only plays at the correct pitch, but is also re-entrant. Then one needs to somehow spin the disk at the correct speed, impervious to voltage fluctuations, and free from wow and flutter. Then there is the issue of optically reading the disk reliably. Many tried and failed and Baldwin was no exception.

[organman95]

It is quite the sophisticated system. Too bad it was so expensive and problematic.

[MarkS]

Thanks for the photos. It is amazing.

Here are some patents:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3660587

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3930430

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3617603

[radagast]

I thought I had some pictures of the Baldwin disk somewhere, but perhaps I was thinking of Welte. Here's some pictures of how Welte did it back in 1936.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]29299[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]29300[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]29301[/ATTACH]

Baldwin wasn't the first to use optical waveforms, as the Welte example from 1936 illustrates, but I think it was the last. There are many challenges to pulling this off. First it is necessary to somehow transcribe the waveform to a circular glass disk so it not only plays at the correct pitch, but is also re-entrant. Then one needs to somehow spin the disk at the correct speed, impervious to voltage fluctuations, and free from wow and flutter. Then there is the issue of optically reading the disk reliably. Many tried and failed and Baldwin was no exception.

Since all the waveforms were on a circular disc, it was constantly looping. The question arises about the attack portion of the sound. The YouTube link on this technology said that the attack portions of the sound were genuine, so I wonder how they did it.

[Admin]

Since all the waveforms were on a circular disc, it was constantly looping. The question arises about the attack portion of the sound. The YouTube link on this technology said that the attack portions of the sound were genuine, so I wonder how they did it.

Look at the patent links posted by MarkS. You'll see there are keyers/envelope generators in the signal chain. There is a recorded chiff waveform. I've not read through the patents yet, but certainly, in principal, splicing some combination of attack, loop, and release waveforms together with keying envelope generation could have been done, even back then.

[jbird604]

In reality, Baldwin may have been building more or less the same organ as the old C-600/601, which had similar attention to detail. But instead of using the outputs of the oscillators and dividers, the basic pitch source was the waveforms picked up by the photocells. These waveforms were then keyed in basically the same manner as they'd done with their sophisticated custom analogs. This would of course sound far more realistic and authentic than their biggest and best analogs, simply because the tones were actual pipe recordings instead of simple sine waves, square waves, pulses, and other concoctions that could be produced by the keying and shaping circuits of previous models.

The chiffing would have also been done in a manner similar to the C-600 series, with a series capacitor in the keying circuit to gate on the appropriate recorded tone for only a brief moment. This too would sound more authentic than analog chiff because it would be made up of true pipe sounds rather than analog waves. Same with the "air" sound, though, looking at the schematic I see some "noise generators" that were possibly nothing but ordinary transistor or neon-lamp hiss-makers, the resulting noise being keyed into the tones like the steady-state sounds.

So maybe the Multi-Wave wasn't as different from their other organs as one might think, with the distinction being primarily the use of the photo-cell outputs in place of the standard divider chain outputs. Rather ingenious, but unfortunately too dependent on a shaky mechanical apparatus that proved to be failure prone.

If the ancient youtube recordings, on which the old LP records are beset by an unacceptable amount of turntable "wow," are any indication, the sound was pretty remarkable for the day.