I am ignorant when it comes to external speakers. I was looking at purchasing a Rodgers organ with eight channels of audio. Is there a such thing as multichannel organ speakers or do I need a different speaker for each channel? Space is a premium and I don't want my living room to be nothing but speakers...I am looking for advice on speakers, especially a setup that would be as compact as possible. Thanks much.
Tim
There are just a few speaker systems I know of where more than 1 channel is contained in a single cabinet.
I owned a pair of Walker units, and I they had 2 channels in each cabinet. If they still make these, they are very attractive & relatively compact for a home installation. The boxes were about 12 inches deep, though about 4 ft x 3 ft. They mounted nicely high on a wall, or could sit on the floor. Their shallow depth was a real advantage in a home installation.
Rodgers made a couple of 2 channel cabinets, too, though much bigger.
But generally you just get one channel per cabinet. One thing to consider, is that most Rodgers analog organs just fed the pedal signal (with big bass performance required) into a single channel, which meant you could use much smaller speakers for the manuals, especially in a home.
For the digital instruments, I don't know the channel requirements.
Though you may be tempted to reduce the number of channels, I don't recommend it. You'll be better off to use all the available channels, but use smaller speakers.
Having recently acquired and installed a Rodgers 660D at one end of our new 16'x24' living room, I also needed a speaker solution that would fit within the space allocated by the facilities manager (i.e., my wife :-). I actually purchased the organ without the original speakers (2 M-13s, 2 W-4s, and a P-2) because I knew they wouldn't fit in my space, but I still wanted all five channels independent for the best sound quality.
This might be considered heresy, but after looking into a number of rather pricey alternatives (like the current Rodgers FR series), I decided to try a set of four Cambridge Soundworks Model 6 bookshelf speakers for the manual channels, graciously loaned to my by our local store in Nashua, NH for testing. Now I've done a lot of sound system installations for electronic organs, sound reinforcement, etc. in my life, but these inexpensive ($150/pair) and compact (18"Hx11"Wx8"D) units work amazingly well with very little voicing adjustment in the organ. Each is powered by a vintage Rodgers TA-50C 50W amp and can drive you out of the room at full power with absolutely no distortion. The chorus reeds reproduce exceptionally well though them. I think the real key with these two-way speakers is their high-efficiency 8" woofer with a low crossover frequency to the mid-tweeter.
These speakers are now parked on shelves well above ear level so that they project into the vaulted ceiling for best dispersion. They fit nicely and are unobtrusive (I have the black finish models). Because of their compact size, I plan to add ones to the other end of the room for the antiphonal channels as soon as I can find suitable amps.
I did have to add an old Conn 15" bass cabinet with a crossover to the flute channel on my organ to keep low frequency distortion from the 16' Lieblich Gedeckt out of the manual flute speaker. Depending on channel configuration of your organ, that may not be a problem.
The only thing remaining to fix in my setup is a decent subwoofer for the pedal channel. Since I already have a S-100C amp driving a cheap passive sub, I'll probably get a SVS CS series passive sub. Very reasonably priced for the quality and the vertical cylinder design is a great space saver.
Besides, if I find something better down the road, I've still got some great hi-fi speakers for my home office and family room :-).
Rodgers 660 with additional analog rack sets (practice), 36D/C in digital conversion, Yamaha CVP-107
In Need of help....I am working on building a digital console 2 manuals, pedals 40 stops. I was wondering if someone could give me direction as to the audio system. Mainly speaker requirements and Amps info. I am going to be using the Jeux Soundfonts, so I will have 4 sound card in my computer. The plan is to have Diapsons 32, 16, 8, 4, 2's, Flutes 32 16, 8, 4,2's, Strings 32 16, 8, 4, 2's, and Mixtures, Mutations, Bells & whistles each on there own channels. There are 3 32' Stops that I would like to use however don't want to have another sound card installed in system. I know absolutely nothing about sounds systems. So all the info anyone could provide would be great.
I was wondering if someone could give me direction as to the audio system. Mainly speaker requirements and Amps info. I am going to be using the Jeux Soundfonts, so I will have 4 sound card in my computer.
This really isn't anwer to your question but...
Are the samples stereo or mono? I'm thinking that you'd likely get a better ensemble if you distributed each tonal family across as many channels as you have available rather than lumping them into one or two channels. This helps to eliminate phase cancellation problems that will arise due to the electrical mixing of samples.
You might want to post this question in the Electronics forum of the Organ Building and Restoration Group. It's likely it will be seen by more people doing the same sort of thing you are than here.
Mr. Bittner is right. If you have 5 channels, for example, put each diapason pitch on its own channel. Then when you distribute the flutes, put the 8' flute on a different channel than the 8' diapason, and the 8' strings on yet a different channel, etc. Now, this is assuming you are building a classical organ. If you are building a theater organ, ignore what we both just said. In that case, you may want to put each stop family on a single channel so that you can apply downstream audio signal processing, such as trems, to each family separately. In general, the more channels you have and the more spatial distribution you have, the better the sound will be, but much depends on the room and the specifics of your organ design. If your PC can't handle all the stops you want, you can add another PC.
"..you'd likely get a better ensemble if you distributed each tonal family across as many channels as you have available rather than lumping them into one or two channels.
This helps to eliminate phase cancellation problems that will arise due to the electrical mixing of samples.
..
If you have 5 channels, for example, put each diapason pitch on its own channel. Then when you distribute the flutes, put the 8' flute on a different channel than the 8' diapason, and the 8' strings on yet a different channel, etc. "
I plan on use of my 2man MIDI Baldwin with the virtual organ progam Hauptwerk, which in the next release has a tremendous flexibility in "channeling" :
"For Hauptwerk v2 you can route any pipes in any channel formats (mono or stereo) to any of the available outputs. So you could, for example, route the 16' Pedal pipes to a mono amplifier driven from output channel 1 on the card, the 8' Pedal pipes to another mono amplifier driven from output channel 2, and then use the remaining outputs as stereo pairs for the other organ divisions. Or any combinations of mono/stereo you wished.
There are also functions to route groups of pipes to a groups of outputs of a particular channel format (e.g. a group of three stereo outputs), and Hauptwerk will distribute the pipes around the output group according to selectable algorithms. "
My M-Audio computer card has up to 8 channels. I can use the original 4+subbas Baldwin amplifier or, what I am inclined to do, instead use a 7.1 Harman Kardon receiver, which gives me 7+1 direct inputs (50w each), driving some speakers like CS Newton M80.
The receiver has 3 (!) separate subbas crossover frequencies - so you can set it for each pair of speakers separately.
I would possibly use the original Baldwin subwoofer (12" and a passive resonator sibling - what is this design?) on the subbas channel.
Of course, the 7+1 speakers (= channels) would be placed around the organ, not in a home theater arrangement.
So, after explaining in extenso my plans, I would like to hear your opinion before I will start to fork out the money, whether this might be a "low cost" solution for the speaker installation.
Also, any suggestions, how I would distribute such Skinner organ across these 8 (7+1) contemplated channels ?
Basicaly as suggested in previous posts ? Note, that the pipes are sampled=recorded in stereo with the ambience of the original church, but there exists an option to load the organ in mono with pseudostereo added by the computer (the latter substantially decreases the processing load on the computer which will be, in next hauptwerk version, substantial).
Still deliberating whether to play the organ in mono version and have the stops dispersed across available channels (avoidance of phase cancellation) or whether to have stereo organ, with two pairs of speakers, with keys (F, F#) alternating between pairs of speakers. The fifth speaker in mono for some pedal stops. Low cut-off to subwoofer.
It would be nice to hide speakers in something like this. I need to find some nicely maintained pipes for the front...
>>This might be considered heresy, but after looking into a number of rather pricey alternatives (like the current Rodgers FR series), I decided to try a set of four Cambridge Soundworks Model 6 bookshelf speakers for the manual channels, graciously loaned to my by our local store in Nashua, NH for testing. Now I've done a lot of sound system installations for electronic organs, sound reinforcement, etc. in my life, but these inexpensive ($150/pair) and compact (18"Hx11"Wx8"D) units work amazingly well with very little voicing adjustment in the organ. Each is powered by a vintage Rodgers TA-50C 50W amp and can drive you out of the room at full power with absolutely no distortion. The chorus reeds reproduce exceptionally well though them. I think the real key with these two-way speakers is their high-efficiency 8" woofer with a low crossover frequency to the mid-tweeter. <<
I have ordered (partly influenced by you) 3 pairs of Cambridge Soundworks Newton m80 3way speakers in that nice flase mahagony (50%off regular price, i.e. $200 for a pair) sale starting today.
The m80 have good reviews on the net.
This will be a low cost approach to a home installation, with a SVS subwoofer coming later, for a PC Hauptwerk based organ with 7 channels powered via 7x50W Harman Kardon receiver.
The room is 16x18 with a high vaulted ceiling.
Now the question I have not solved yet (as I described it above in this thread) is how to distribute voices/stops/groups of an organ like http://www.milandigitalaudio.com/skinner.htm
across the 7 (mono) or 3 (stereo)+1mono channels (below100Hz goes to the subwoofer).
>>The higher end models allow for tuning the speakers in the room to the sitting location of your choice, or having 2 complete speaker setups in 2 different rooms.<<
Is the second zone stereo only (common now) or are two surround setups possible ?
I have tried repeatedly over many many months to get Walker to sell me speakers for my Rodgers 550 and have given up.
I have contacted them several times by phone and by email, talking to several people there. I tell them what model Rodgers I have, show them pics of it etc, and they apparently no longer make the speakers for those models and refuse to return my calls/emails.
Just FYI, so I am going to have to research some other suggestions that have been posted here. I've had the Rodgers 550 at my Mom's house for almost a year now and she is getting kinda antsy to have the speakers it came with out of her house as they are pretty ugly.
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