Allens Are Amazing.

[Hiawatha]

So I finally had some time today to put reverb on my latest acquisition--the 1973 Allen 120 Something or Other MOS-1. It is in mint condition and sounds better than absolutely any MOS-1 I've ever heard. So I opened it up and saw the evidence of how far Allen will go to make sure that a 47 year old organ is still running in tip-top shape. The previous owners mentioned that they had a new computer board put in about three years ago. So as you can see here they must have found a work around once the old MOS components were no longer available.

I braved the weather (coyotes and groundhogs are spontaneously bursting into flames) and stole the Harrison Labs attenuators off of another Allen 120 Something or other I have in the garage that I can't get to work and added one of about five Aleis Reverb units I got on ebay for like $20 about 20 years ago. Again I can say that it's astonishing how it sounds now. The balance of the divisions is a bit off now and the expression pedal is not as "expressive" as it was before, but I'll experiment a bit and see what I can do.

Long story short. If you are looking for a practice organ, bide your time until an Allen (even a 47 year old MOS-1) becomes available a reasonable distance from you. It will be well worth it.

[rjsilva]

You should make a recording for us to hear. You can upload it to SoundCloud.

[myorgan]

Hiawatha,

Isn't that something about the motherboard?!!! I've never seen an adapted motherboard like the one you have on that organ. Thank you for sharing about the reverb additions. I'll be interested to hear the recordings as well. Is it still possible to make comparison recordings between before & after reverb?

Thanks so much for starting this thread.

Michael

[jbird604]

So true! No other mass-produced organ even comes close in build quality, and the sound of the old MOS technology holds up amazingly well these days. Adding reverb makes a very big difference in the enjoyment of the sound.

This past week, we freshened up an old single-computer MOS for a local guy to use in his church's choir room. It was a very old one, having been built in the first year of MOS production, and had originally been sold with a pair of gyro speakers, which are now long gone.

The original speakers had held the amps, so those were also missing. (He'd gotten the organ free from a defunct church.) We installed one of the Rockville powered box mixers (RPM45) that I talked about in another thread. It has four inputs, though it mixes everything down to a single channel (which is not a terrible thing to do to a small MOS organ). But it also has built-in "reverb" of a sort. Not a sophisticated reverb like an Alesis or Lexicon, just a rudimentary digital delay line that is much better than a spring reverb.

Anyway, when we got the organ playing through this new amp with the reverb turned up about halfway, and after making some tweaks to the bass and treble controls on each channel, the organist tried it out and was astounded at how good the old thing sounds. And this church has a magnificent pipe organ in the sanctuary, so he hears good organ sound regularly.

He also mentioned that he has a Baldwin digital from the 90's at home for a practice instrument, and that this old Allen MOS sounds far better than the Baldwin, even though it's 20 years newer.

MOS will live forever.

[davidecasteel]

Did it have a card reader?

[Hiawatha]

The current organ does not have a card reader and I do not believe the one in the garage did. I had a System 600 that had a card reader and, although there were some really quite nice sounds on it, I never really used it seriously. I suppose if I had used the 600 in church, I might have used it for some of the reeds and mixture cards.