Two Organs - Allen vs Baldwin

[tsilvent]

I own a Baldwin 48C church organ. Everything plays. From time to time, I have problems with it - like a crackling noise for 6 months. Miraculously, they resolve themselves. No more crackling now for many months. Can't explain - don't even ask.

Will am planning to purchase Allen MDC-42 for about $1000.

The Baldwin has special sentiment - an anniversary gift from a thrift store for $45 several years ago.

I can only keep one organ longterm due to a very small house, and am a substitute church organist.

Please advise. Thanks.

[radagast]

I own a Baldwin 48C church organ. Everything plays. From time to time, I have problems with it - like a crackling noise for 6 months. Miraculously, they resolve themselves. No more crackling now for many months. Can't explain - don't even ask.

Will am planning to purchase Allen MDC-42 for about $1000.

The Baldwin has special sentiment - an anniversary gift from a thrift store for $45 several years ago.

I can only keep one organ longterm due to a very small house, and am a substitute church organist.

Please advise. Thanks.

If it is indeed an Allen MDC-42, then $1000 is WAY too much for it. MDC stood for "Modified Digital Computer". It was designed to be their VERY low end line. The waveforms were not even as sophisticated as the MOS 1 line. Check out Jbird604's description in this post:

http://www.organforum.com/forums/sho...-20-home-organ

[tsilvent]

What is a fair price?

[radagast]

What is a fair price?

Maybe others can chime in, but I sold a MOS-1 200 series with 5 external speaker cabinets for $500.00. And that is a better organ than an MDC.

I'm pretty sure it still had a 12 note limitation.

[jbird604]

Each has its pros and cons of course. You'll just have to decide which one you can't live without. I assume you will have both of them in the house at the same time for a while, and that is a good thing. You can go back and forth between them and make your comparisons before you decide which one to send away.

The Baldwin is getting pretty old, and one of these days the crackling will not go away, but it's probably something repairable, though it might cost a few hundred dollars for a tech to renovate a power supply or amp or something. The expression pedal may have one or more of those flexible resistive strips that Baldwin used for a long time, and if so, it is expensive to replace, if that's the source of the noise. The Baldwin is plain old analog, and rather primitive analog at that, with direct keying of all the pitches. A lot of things CAN go wrong, but you might be lucky and keep playing it for another 40 years. At least it doesn't have any tubes in it to burn out and burn up other things with heat. Most of the parts inside are fairly generic, so it doesn't really matter than Baldwin offers no factory support of any kind for something this old. Robert Spoon still has some service manuals and parts for this series though.

The Allen MDC42 is considered a very lowly entry-level Allen, hardly worthy of the name, in many ways. The "MDC" line was created around the late 70's to provide a replacement for the analog T-12, which had been Allen's rock-bottom organ for a couple of decades, but was finally discontinued. Dealers wanted to be able to sell something very cheaply, so Allen rolled out the MDC models. These are a greatly diminished version of MOS technology, using only 3 samples to create all the stops. Now, if you aren't particular about the stops being unique, I will say that the samples themselves are quite good. It's just that the 16', 8', 4', and 2' stop in each family is the same sound, just transposed by octaves. More or less like an analog unit organ, but with digital tone generation.

Other compromises were used in this series, including: no couplers (which would've been redundant, as the divisions all have the same stops anyway), and no mixtures. The "celeste" is produced by "celeste effect" on the Swell only, and it reduces the number of keys you can play at once to just six when in use. The "carillon" stop is even worse, as that stop uses up FIVE of the available 12 slots to produce each note. Since the notes decay slowly, you will have five slots tied up for a good while with every note you strike. It's hardly good for anything except chiming of the hour. You sure can't play a melody on it for a solo effect unless you are playing REALLY slow. There are five preset pistons that can't be changed.

All that being said (and I've said a lot), the MDC is actually perfectly decent when used as a basic organ. The 42 does at least have genuine AGO pedals, while the Baldwin's pedals are slightly off from the standard. Avoid using the celeste and the carillon, and you will have the same 12-note-at-a-time capacity as all Allen organs. If you don't need pistons that you can set, the factory presets are decent enough. And if you don't need it to register exactly as you would register a large pipe organ (that is, you don't mind not having mixtures and couplers), you won't really notice these limitations.

And the MDC is fully supported by Allen, so you can be sure of getting parts and service for a very long time. The keyboards are the same as those used on the most expensive Allen models, as are the pedals and the expression pedal. The console is classic Allen too. So it's a solid organ, built to last, but there are certainly some compromises in the design.

Bottom line, both organs are decent, but neither is really superb. Either can make good music, and that is what counts. You will probably know what to do once you have them sitting side by side.