any experience with Saville organs?

[snacks]

There's a next-to-free Saville (the model is listed as Sovereign) on my local craigslist - advertised as working - and I'm intrigued. According to online documentation, it has two 61 key manuals and an AGO pedal clavier, and from the picture I can see it's got three swell pedals. I'm not necessarily interested in the most accurate pipe organ sound, as I like the character of early analogs. Can anyone shed further light on these organs? Basically, talk me out of or into this one...

[andyg]

Not much in the 'Mother List'. They used the name 'Sovereign' for 10 different models, but the list doesn't say what the differences are. The only manufacturing years given are 1971 and 1976. Tone generation is solid state, independent oscillators, no dividers. And that's it.

[snacks]

Yes, I saw that in Jan Girardot's master list as well. The most I've uncovered is this video of someone playing one:
https://youtu.be/GyrJqaAnQkA

There was also a thread or two on these forums about them, but they didn't seem to have much info.

[myorgan]

Snacks,

The Saville is a nice analog organ. It is plausible it is still playing well after all these years, however, there is probably something wrong. I've only played 2-3 Saville organs, but they were quite nice sounding when I played them. Each one had quite a nice stoplist, and had what was probably one of the most pipe-like sounds coming from an analog. I would compare it with the Rodgers analog organs of the time.

As you can see by the photos in the ad, the speakers are quite unique, but I believe that has something to do with the unique sound of the organ. I was actually interested in that organ until I saw it was on the other side of the country. You'd never believe how many times something comes up in Portland, OR I'm interested in, but have to not consider it because I'm so much closer to the real Portland (Maine).

Where you're fixing up your organs to clear out some of the inventory, I'm not sure this one would be a money-maker for you, but it will certainly make someone a good organ-even for practice.

Michael

[John Vanderlee]

Just recently I had an acquaintance offer me a Saville, if anyone is interested, New York is MUCH closer to Portland Maine!

[toodles]

Saville was originally located north of Chicago, IL. Their organs use individual oscillators and lots of them For analog organs, they have a very pipe-like sound and the character is very rich. Lots of individual speakers--they used cardboard tubes with speaker mounted at one end, sort of a primitive transmission line affair, which was low in cost but good in performance, allowing for lots of speakers. When I first heard a Saville I heard was not certain if it was pipe or electronic, and it was very musical.

There shouldn't be anything in a Saville organ that couldn't be repaired--I believe they only use transistors and diodes, with no integrated circuits, but if there are IC's, they are probably generic ones that can still be sourced if needed.

They were working on a digital tone generation system based on control of individual harmonics before they closed--their successor (either by sale or by bankruptcy) was in Kansas; AOB Organs followed the same sort of design.

This site is worth a view: https://organistheidi.com/saville-organ/

[Horseshoe_or]

Saville organs were good in their day and still a good sounding instrument. The Sovereign instruments were made for off the shelf electronics so they should be easy to maintain. As I recall, the smallest model had 6 amps and tube speakers. The larger models had 12. Saville had something unfortunate happen. They got a shipment of defective tuning pots. They built several dozen instruments with them before they discovered the problem. This led to the competition hammering them about tuning instability. The smallest instrument had over 400 tunable oscillators. That's a lot and it took considerable time to get all those instruments fixed. The defective tuning pots really led to the demise of Saville. The tonal system in most Savilles is called series 4. Towards the end, they came out with Series 5 which was an amazing sound. The company was bought by folks in Witchita, KS. They built series 5 instruments. By then, the dealer network had abandoned Saville. I have in my files brochures on most Saville Sovereign models. If you will message me the model number and your email, I will scan the brochure and email it to you.

[myorgan]

Horseshoe,

Thank you so much for the information.

Were the tube speakers open back or closed (like an extended can speaker)?

Michael

[Horseshoe_or]

The speaker tubes for totally closed.

[beel m]

What you said about defective tuning pots is interesting. Here in SE PA we had, way back when, an active Saville dealer (Fred Taylor) who sold a bunch to evangelical churches, with which group he had 'connections.' (I don't recall ever losing a 'normal' Allen sale to Saville). All of them had tuning issues, which I attributed to the RC (coil-less) oscillators. BTW they weren't cheap- the Sovereigns were supposed to be the 'economy' line, but Taylor was selling 10-generator Sovereigns for $30K installed, in 1973 dollars.

[AllenAnalog]

I own a Saville that is a bit earlier than the Sovereign model, which I think was their more budget line. I always liked the sound of it - with a rich and full ensemble. When my now deceased friend bought it from the church he left the Sonotubes behind, just taking the two plywood disks with 11 speakers on each one and the two 15" bass speakers. There is a separate amplifier for each of the 24 audio channels. I've had various arrangements of the speakers in the house but never went back to Sonotubes due to a lack of space for them.

The console probably came from Klann. It is rock solid construction. Mine has a mechanical capture combination action, so the console it is a big heavy beast. The one in the ad looks more like Heidi's instrument with fixed combinations. My friend had to cut small diagonal pieces out of the rear top of the sides of the console so it could be rotated on its side through a 36" doorway. I used the same technique to get it in my front door.

The tone generator circuit boards are huge - almost the width of the console. I have nine of them in my instrument. One problem on some Saville organs was the pots used for tuning. I have not had trouble with mine. I do need to replace the power supply capacitors since I get a hum when I use the crescendo pedal or put on too many stops. Fortunately, the organ came with a full set of schematics, and as mentioned above, there are no electronic parts inside that would be difficult to find if you need to make repairs.

After not using the instrument for a while, I fired it up and found some notes did not play. After learning how to open up the manuals for servicing, a bit of contact burnishing with a dollar bill completely fixed that problem.

Do a search on "saville organ" and you will find some previous threads on the Forum about these instruments.

If you like the sound of analog instruments, a Saville or AOB will be a good choice. In today's market they really have no value but it looks like the owner of this instrument just wants it gone. Tom Britanyak lives in Washington state and he works on AOB instruments so he might also be a source of Saville repair help. http://www.britson.com/

[james]

I remember playing on a Saville a couple of times in a local church. It had nine speaker, and a very nice console. Yes indeed it was close to a Pipe Organ sound. It was very nice sounding with a great variety of stops. I remember it was installed in 1978, and by the early 90's it was replaced by a six rank Pipe Organ. The Saville had been moved from the balcony to the front of the church, and was dropped with a heavy thud during the move. It was up for sale as the Pipe Organ was being installed, but no one bought it. I didn't have room for the console and all of the nine speakers. It was later just given away to get it out of the church.

James

[Coenraads]

A friend of mine asked me if I could refurbish his Saville organ. It sounded like an interesting project until I looked under the hood. There were eight or so panels the width of the console (as has already been pointed out) with massive circuit boards containing thousands of discrete parts. The parts looked generic but it is hard to imagine the capacitors would all have survived for these many years. The console and pedal looked well built, and the combination action still worked. The keyboard contacts appeared in great condition and to my eye appeared to be silver on silver.

I suggested that with a couple of Arduinos the console could be quite easily converted to a VPO and offered to do it. But he declined saying he wanted to restore the vaunted Saville sound with its multiplicity of independent oscillators. I'm sure the organ is still sitting in his garage as I doubt there is anyone in BC willing to take on this massive task.

So do take a good look inside and if worst comes to worst a VPO conversion is possible.
John

[jbird604]

No offense intended here, but perhaps I'll be the contrarian and thrown some cold water out there. And yes, many of us have memories of having heard some big old analog organ back 50 years ago that really knocked our socks off (though in my case at least, I'm positive that it was not nearly so good as I thought it was at the time, since I certainly had never heard a truly great organ in my whole life when I was 17 years old!)

Coenraad's report ^^ basically sums up the cons of taking on one of these things -- "hard to imagine the capacitors would all have survived for these many years" (not to mention all the transistors and the rest of the 25,000 parts in there) -- and the impracticality of restoring one, given how much easier it would be to simply MIDI up the console and build a VPO with it.

As we've all heard, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and if I had a nickel for every old organ I took in and thought I'd fix up, well, I'd have a pocketful of nickels! Honestly, call me an old crank if you like, but I haven't heard very many old organs like that which I'd want to put much time into, given how frustrating that can be, and how readily available are some pretty darn good digital organs today.

Nobody can argue that Saville didn't take analog technology to some extremes, using hundreds of oscillators in a typical organ, and having dozens of audio channels. Many of their organs surely sounded amazing, at least on first hearing. And the consoles are well-made and durable, certainly outlasting the innards. But unless you are working off a nearly unlimited budget, when you try to put together an organ with 600 oscillators and 24 audio channels and be able to sell if for a price that people can pay, you've got to use some CHEAP stuff -- and thus the RC oscillators (vs. Allen's LC units), and thus the ultra-cheap low-powered audio amps and the inventive but crude piles of cardboard tubes with a single driver in one end, and those inverted washtubs with speakers facing upward, instead of heavily-braced and scientifically designed 3-way wide-range speaker systems with quality components.

Anyway, next time someone tries to give me one, I'll be tempted to borrow a phrase from our own Seamaster... "burn it with fire!" .... But I know some people will consider that heresy if not treason. Ok, I'll quit blabbering and get back to fixing somebody's old organ...

[AllenAnalog]

No offense taken. My 1972 Saville tone generation system still works just fine, as does the one in my 1971 Allen analog (namesake of my alias on here) 3-m theater organ. I know they are both living on borrowed time and some day I'll have to make the decision to turn the Allen console into a VPO when the TG caps start giving me too much trouble. So far so good.

Some time after the first of the year I will be offering the Saville for free on Craigslist because I am not taking it with me to Grand Junction. (I already have three organs over there.) I hope it finds a good home but if not I'll keep the 24 amps and speakers for my VPO projects.

[snacks]

Great thoughts, everyone. Yes, it IS a ridiculous project if I decide to work on it. I've already got many organs requiring various amounts of work. However, I am still charmed by vintage analogs, and may take this thing anyway... it's hard to watch any instrument get junked. I recently missed out on a Rodgers 33E that could have been a fun one to play a bit.
If not this Saville, what's an easier make to work on and maintain? I have two Conns that are packed with electronics but seem to be holding fairly strong, and I have service manuals for both. I've heard Rodgers was built with high-quality parts, having been founded by ex-Tektronix employees. They are also relatively plentiful here in Oregon, as the HQ was (is?) in Hillsboro, OR. Generally, I'm not interested in divider organs as they can sound a bit sterile (like old Baldwins). I've also limited myself to only consoles with an AGO 32 pedalboard, just so I don't go after everything I see (although this certainly runs me up against space constraints...)

[Horseshoe_or]

With Rodgers and Allens, remember that they only provide parts to their own service people. The Saville, on the other hand, you can get electronic parts through any electronics store.

[AllenAnalog]

Your statement is basically true but it applies much more to digital instruments, and in particular with Allen, from the MDS models onward. The analog instruments use no proprietary electronic parts, just standard off-the-shelf components. An assembly like a SAM can be found on the second hand market.

Ebay, Daffer and others have have listed a substantial number of Allen parts for MOS-1, MOS-2, ADC and MADC digital instruments as instruments are retired and parted out. Recently I've been surprised to see both Renaissance and Quantum parts on the 'bay.

[snacks]

I know at least two organ techs who have parted out Rodgers and Allen consoles over the years, most times they've been able to track down whatever Hammond parts I've looked for

[Piperdane]

. . . If you like the sound of analog instruments, a Saville or AOB will be a good choice. In today's market they really have no value but it looks like the owner of this instrument just wants it gone. Tom Britanyak lives in Washington state and he works on AOB instruments so he might also be a source of Saville repair help. http://www.britson.com/

My church has an AOB, some 800 oscillators or so ... totally analog and the sound is totally amazing. There are 48 channels feeding 47 speakers, 6 of which are dedicated to the pedal division alone.
AOB took the Saville design many steps forward created a wonderful instrument in every way. The only "digital" part of our AOB is the C-Mos memory for the capture system; there are 6 memories.

We have a retired IBM electronic engineer, who is a member of our church, that takes care of the organ when/if anything goes awry, which is very seldom. The AOB was installed new in 1989 in the [then] new sanctuary.

Indeed the biggest expense in the repair of an AOB is the speakers ... we have spares, and our IBM guy rewired all the speaker tubes with QD's instead of being hard wired, and they can be swapped out in a matter of minutes. Tom Britanyak has been a wonderful source of information and is able to provide to provide parts other than the off the shelf electronics.

Recently hosted an AGO organ crawl ... we visited my church with the AOB - some of these "died in the wool pipe organ" people could not believe their ears on how pipe-like the AOB sound was, and this being analog technology to boot. We visited two other churches, one with an Allen digital and the other with the latest Rodgers 3 manual ... they all much preferred the sound of the AOB ... :-)

[jbird604]

I guess my post up above sounded kinda harsh. Like some of you, I have heard good old analogs. My first real love affair with an organ was with an old Rodgers model 32 in a big old Baptist church. I heard it when attending a conference at that church as a freshman in college, and I assumed it was a pipe organ. It was full, rich, loud, and had those powerful pedal stops (from the big P1 speaker cabinet). I assumed at the time that this was about the most amazing organ in the world.

Forty-something years later I now service that same organ, and of course it doesn't seem all that grand from my current perspective. In fact, even though it knocked my socks off in 1971, to be honest I wouldn't want it if they tried to give it to me, because it's just another old analog organ that has been long superseded in every way, and right now it has more problems than you can shake a stick at. But IF I had plenty of room for it, and the time, and really wanted to love it again, I might think it worth the effort, especially given that it was built back in the day when Rodgers was truly a powerhouse in the organ industry and the parts are basically generic too, no IC's at all in there.

Regarding Saville -- I must admit that the only Saville instruments I have encountered in recent years were not good examples of the craft. We had a dealership here back in the 70's but they sold only a handful of them, and nearly all in the lower price range. As a curious young wannabe organist, I hung around that store and drooled over the brochures. I recall being in awe of the Saville models in those flashy brochures, with those hundreds of oscillators and many many audio channels. Oddly enough, this particular dealer had managed to be both a Saville dealer AND an Allen dealer at the same time, so he had them side by side, and my impression way back then was that he considered the Saville to be the "premium" organ in the store and the Allen the more ordinary. Not hard to understand, as he only stocked single-computer MOS organs, having only two audio channels, of course.

Of course back then I had no real experience with organs of any kind, and I don't remember anything at all about how the Savilles in the store sounded compared to the Allens. They probably sounded good, given that most any product sounds decent enough when it's brand new and in an ideal environment such as the store that sells them. And I was just a kid, so I never went out to hear any of them after he installed them.

Only 10 or 15 years later, when I became the Allen salesman at that same store, and started to service organs all over the state, did I start to encounter some of them. They all, without exception, seemed to have deteriorated horribly. Every church that had one was considering getting rid of it. Some of them traded them back to the same dealer, going with a new Allen this time! The churches that owned them all had similar complaints -- their organs would no longer stay in tune any time at all, sounded sour and sick every time they were played. Speakers had gone bad, audio channels stopped worked, capture action stopped working. They just seemed more like 50 years old instead of 15.

So that's why I don't have much good to say about them. But on the bright side, I do know folks who picked one up for free or nearly free from one of these churches, and poked around in it enough to make it playable, got a respectable practice organ for little investment. No doubt that the consoles were pretty and well built and worth saving, for a person who didn't care if some of the stops didn't work any more.

Perhaps they did better work later on in their history. Surely their larger and more expensive organs were better and lasted longer than the smaller and cheaper ones our local dealer seems to have sold.

So my impression is based on relatively limited exposure. I might think something entirely different about Saville if I had been around one like described above that still serves a church and sounds impressive every Sunday.

[beel m]

John, I agree with you, but more with your other post. As I mentioned above, there was an active Saville dealer in SE PA years ago and he sold a bunch of Sovereigns in the mid 1970's. Not one is left. Most were replaced because of churches tiring of the many expen$ive service calls. Meanwhile there are many, many Allen MOS-1's of the same vintage, including mine and my church's, still going strong. As regards price- as I mentioned above also, said dealer typically charged $30K then for a 10-generator Sovereign installed. For that price you could at that time get a System 1200 Allen installed, plus a dedicated subwoofer...

[jbird604]

Beel, thanks for confirming my own impressions. Interesting that he was selling Sovereigns for a price that would've fetched an Allen 1200, and people actually bought them. From today's perspective, it's hard to imagine that anybody would've turned down an Allen of that size and magnificence for even a large analog. But little did we know...

And TBH, back then, when I was just a wannabe hanging out around the various organ dealers in town, I thought I favored the Rodgers analogs (like the 220 and 330 back then) over Allen. Unfortunately, at the time, our local Allen dealer didn't have "connections" with the evangelical churches in the state (who vastly dominated the organ market), even had sort of a bad reputation in that segment. The big liturgical churches mostly had pipe organs, leaving this guy with not much of a market. Thus he chose to only stock the very low end Allens, System 100 and 200. That being my only exposure to Allen digitals, I thought they were terribly bland and sterile, not nearly as exciting and pipe-like as the big Rodgers analogs. But as you say, the Allen MOS organs have endured, and pretty much everything else from that era is long gone.

[snacks]

After much negotiation I picked up the console today. No sign of the Sonotubes - looks to have had two homebrew speaker cabinets built for it, one of which was a Hammond tone cab with more speakers added on the back. No bench, but I should be able to use a bench from one of my other AGO consoles. Broke at least one vacuum/magnet/reed switch on the pedals. Evidence of mice in the lower part of the organ on the ground level. Speaker cabling had been unceremoniously cut, so there was no way to see what worked. It's in my storage unit for now. According to a scrap of paper (on Rodgers Instruments memo paper, haha) it is a Model 7221, serial 2017. If it sits for too long and I decide it's too much trouble, it might be worth something to someone as a Hauptwerk project. For now, I want to see if I can get it making music.