Sorry - I just can't seem to figure out how to upload the Shutterfly photo to this forum. You can Google it if you're interested.
Dr. D - I also enjoy the organ. I still find it amazing that people way back when could do what they did with no electricity,
And I well remember that old E. Power Biggs "Music of Jubilee" album. I first heard it when I was in high school. I still count that "Sinfonia to Cantata #29" among my all-time favorite musical selections.
I'll report back with a report of our results - the good, the bad and the ugly.
Bach On
Dr. D - I also enjoy the organ. I still find it amazing that people way back when could do what they did with no electricity,
And I well remember that old E. Power Biggs "Music of Jubilee" album. I first heard it when I was in high school. I still count that "Sinfonia to Cantata #29" among my all-time favorite musical selections.
I'll report back with a report of our results - the good, the bad and the ugly.
Bach On
Well, if we know the air pressure / velocity through the pipes, I would imagine you could get pretty close by some vas / sd versus pipe diameter / air velocity.
I'm betting the answer would probably be somewhere in the dozens of 18" long throw woofers for a single 32' pipe, though.
I'm betting the answer would probably be somewhere in the dozens of 18" long throw woofers for a single 32' pipe, though.
Just to be really clear about this, I'm not talking about OP with this statement and figured I should probably clarify that, but I imagine it's incredibly rare to see a good engineer designing or mixing a church system. I've seen a LOT of bad church systems and very few good ones.
Does anyone know if the electronics involved simulate the harmonics of the pipes or not?
If the electronics throw a 16 hz clean note at the speakers and the speakers reproduce that faithfully, it won't sound anything even remotely close to a 16 hz pipe which is by definition absolutely loaded with severe undamped pipe resonances. Is this all covered in the electronics? If not that would explain a lot...
I'd like to assume that the electrical engineers manufacturing the equipment covered this but assuming can be a dangerous thing and I already think they made some bad choices in other areas as I've pointed out.
If the electronics throw a 16 hz clean note at the speakers and the speakers reproduce that faithfully, it won't sound anything even remotely close to a 16 hz pipe which is by definition absolutely loaded with severe undamped pipe resonances. Is this all covered in the electronics? If not that would explain a lot...
I'd like to assume that the electrical engineers manufacturing the equipment covered this but assuming can be a dangerous thing and I already think they made some bad choices in other areas as I've pointed out.
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A single driver would need about eleven trillion buttloads of excursion, if my napkin math is correct.
In my flurry of reading about the subject yesterday and today, guiness record for spl is around 130 db for an organ, so I'd say 105-110 might be a reasonable maximum. In a very large space, it'd have to be crazy powerful....think...Pink Floyd outdoor subwoofer array.
Well... that would work of course, and all the harmonics would be present, genuine and realistic, but if you have a 32' pipe why not just hook it up to a windbox and use it as a pipe?
Hi Y'all,
Good to see that everyone still has fun w/ this.
Big Thank You to Bach On for taking the time to add a little bit of information about organs. Cameron Carpenter's touring organ is just stunning, and a part of the low end (?) is hidden in the back behind the main speakers according to a NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/a...-performs-on-his-touring-instrument.html?_r=0
JAG, Post #205: "Does anyone know if the electronics involved simulate the harmonics of the pipes or not?"
Bach On answered this in: Post #195: "We will also have the ability to change the sounds by selected samples stored in the memory of the sound engine. Our hope is to make the blend between the real pipes and the digital sounds so subtle that MOST people won't be able to tell the difference. Careful Voicing (balancing the sounds - both pipes and electronics - will be required to accomplish that. Ours will be what has come to be called a hybrid organ."
We use to play around with synthesizing sounds in the late 1970s and early 1980s, digital sampling technology has pretty much replaced those efforts as far as I know. I'm sure somebody is still out there working w/ sounds on a more basic level, but for electronic organs (and other electronic instruments) that just wouldn't make sense anymore. Neither would a driver at the end of 32"long pipes (I think). 🙂 So much easier to just pick the sound from a sample, and play it back through speakers.
Regards,
Good to see that everyone still has fun w/ this.
Big Thank You to Bach On for taking the time to add a little bit of information about organs. Cameron Carpenter's touring organ is just stunning, and a part of the low end (?) is hidden in the back behind the main speakers according to a NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/a...-performs-on-his-touring-instrument.html?_r=0
JAG, Post #205: "Does anyone know if the electronics involved simulate the harmonics of the pipes or not?"
Bach On answered this in: Post #195: "We will also have the ability to change the sounds by selected samples stored in the memory of the sound engine. Our hope is to make the blend between the real pipes and the digital sounds so subtle that MOST people won't be able to tell the difference. Careful Voicing (balancing the sounds - both pipes and electronics - will be required to accomplish that. Ours will be what has come to be called a hybrid organ."
We use to play around with synthesizing sounds in the late 1970s and early 1980s, digital sampling technology has pretty much replaced those efforts as far as I know. I'm sure somebody is still out there working w/ sounds on a more basic level, but for electronic organs (and other electronic instruments) that just wouldn't make sense anymore. Neither would a driver at the end of 32"long pipes (I think). 🙂 So much easier to just pick the sound from a sample, and play it back through speakers.
Regards,
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I saw that, but it doesn't specifically state what the samples are of. I'd like to assume they are what is needed but I'd rather know for sure than assume. If it's a sample of an electric organ it won't have the harmonics. If it's a sample of a pipe organ that's better but brings up more questions. Close mic type of capture or distant capture? What type of pipe organ was sampled and what type of room was it sampled in? So many questions. Probably doesn't make much difference if it was done well, but who knows. Not me.
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Organs are not expected to “sound the same", any more than human voices are. That’s part of the charm. The building is a part of the organ . . . imparting different “color” to pipes in different locations. Registration can make a great difference in how a particular work sounds, and part of that is completely lost (all “position” related information) when different ranks are sounded through the same speaker.
Even the best speakers have very high distortion when driven at “organ” levels . . . the harmonic distortion is unobtrusive and becomes a part of that stop’s “sound”, but the associated intermodulation if multiple notes are sounding through the same speaker is not. We don’t notice it so much with most music (when we do we call it “congestion” or “grunge”) because most music is impulsive and rapidly changing. Organs are just the opposite . . . notes are commonly continuous and sustained, so intermodulation artifacts are quite noticeable and generally not pleasant.
Those are just a couple of the many reasons why what you suppose to be a “easy engineering problem” isn’t. As someone once said: “for every complex problem there exists at least one solution that is simple, obvious and wrong.” Pumping everything through a couple of “hi fi” speakers is one such solution . . .
When I think of speakers that might be able to do justice to pipe organs, I think more like this:
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
Edit: Or these: http://voidacoustics.com/docs/range_intros/Incubus.shtml
To paraphrase - the flaws and colorations are part of the charm. It's really not that hard to recreate these flaws and colorations.
I already said dispersion (and probably should have used the word spaciousness as well) is the only thing a single channel speaker couldn't do to accurately recreate a massive pipe system, but thanks for repeating it in different words.
If you want wide dispersion and spacious sound and acoustic interference there's no problem with that, I already said use 64 channels for all I care, just don't take space away from the subwoofers to do it.
In THIS case, from what I've inferred, the OP is going to stack all these speakers in one spot in the pipe room, so this dispersion and spaciousness and acoustic interference that you are so excited about isn't going to happen anyway.
Only if you use vastly inadequate cone displacement and box size. As you should know speakers are capable of remarkably low distortion if used well within their limits. In THIS case OP is using an acoustically tiny displacement single driver in an acoustically tiny cab with an acoustically tiny amount of power. In that case, yeah, it's going to have massively high distortion when pushed hard. That's specifically why I recommend using a lot more and better drivers and boxes for the lower frequencies. Even my recommendation of eight 18 inch drivers and big ported boxes for them is acoustically small, but I didn't go further due to the stated budget concerns.
If you actually read what I wrote a long time ago, I addressed both of these issues. Use lots of channels and drivers and boxes if you want and think you need the dispersion, spacious sound and acoustic interference, just don't steal space from the low frequency section for them. AND don't stack them all in one spot if you want to recreate the spacious sound and acoustic interference of a real organ, closely stacked boxes won't sound spacious or interfere the way you want. If they are within 1/4 wave of each other they will simulate a single source. You can't recreate a wall to wall 2 story pipe organ with 8 closely stacked boxes. There's actual science behind all this, not just industry buzzwords.
Use a large number of large volume displacement drivers in large resonant boxes for the lower notes. Then distortion isn't even an issue much less a problem.
This really is an easy engineering job. You just need to understand acoustics and have a LOT of money to do it properly. DSL does it, apparently Carpenter did it. And for engineers that understand the physics, acoustics and concepts at play it isn't even difficult. But Danley systems cost tens of thousands of dollars minimum, Carpenter's cost a million. Trying to do this on a $500 budget is the problem, not the science part.
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So you speculate. When (if ever) you actually try to do it (as per your speculation) you will be in for a rude awakening . . .
The answer is: all of the above. 🙂 Seriously, it depends on which company you're asking.
Allen Organ for example has an anechoic chamber (or at least access to one) where they can sample individual pipes. This approach is probably the best, in my opinion, since it then allows them to mix the individual samples any way they choose, (using lots of boxes, hee!) then add the acoustics back in using the natural sound of the new space, selectable room impulse convolutions (in the later models), or some combination of the two. The drawback of doing it this way is that the pipes must usually be dismantled from an organ somewhere and carefully transported, which is of course expensive and logistically difficult.
Other companies like Hauptwerk offer a mostly software-based approach, where the samples reside in a standard PC and are played via MIDI etc. through whatever audio the user wants to provide. Unless I'm mistaken, their sampling is done in situ for the most part; that is, they go to where the pipes are instead of the other way round. This is obviously much easier & cheaper, but raises several other issues. Probably the main one is that these samples include not only the pipe sounds but that of the space they're in, so you're basically stuck with that room sound whether you like it or not. This actually works not too badly when "playback" occurs in a relatively dead room - it can sound pretty cool in a living room, for example. But when you're trying to use these sounds in a larger space like a church, the two reverb signatures then add together in ways that are not always pleasant, and there's not much you can do about it. There are other problems with this approach, but I need to go make me a sammich.
-- Jim
Someone asked a way back about the acoustic output of a typical pipe organ. I don't have any figures for that, but I do know the bigger organs use blower motors in the 20 to 200 horsepower range. Some clips:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFJxnLndujE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9aikDwrnso
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRpCVs3GvfY
That last one is serious machinery, some of the blowers for the Atlantic City Convention Centre organ.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFJxnLndujE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9aikDwrnso
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRpCVs3GvfY
That last one is serious machinery, some of the blowers for the Atlantic City Convention Centre organ.
You have to try a bit harder than that. Does physics follow different rules in churches than everywhere else in the world?
I think I've shown that I have a pretty good grasp on the science and acoustical factors at play, if you disagree then please point out my obvious and glaring errors. EVERY issue you've brought up I already addressed before you brought it up. AND I've showed that OP's system, which you endorse, is not going to do what he wants it to do. There's nowhere near enough displacement at 16 hz, nowhere near enough box size, nowhere near enough power. And clumping the 8 higher tuned boxes together in a single stack is not going to provide the "position related information" (as you put it) so it won't sound much (if any) different than a single channel single large speaker except at high frequencies, and even then won't be spread out enough to sound spacious.
So if I've already addressed WHY the system that you endorsed won't do what you say it should do and already addressed how to fix those issues, why do you think I couldn't design a system that operates the way it should?
I'm a bit behind in how the traditional electronics in these organ systems work but as far as I can tell, outside of the specific traditional organ electronics I haven't made any errors in anything I've posted. If you disagree point out the errors and we can discuss them. Otherwise posts like this are just passive aggressive posturing - there's no content, no technical information, no rebuttal of anything I said, just completely uninformed speculation that I don't have the skills or knowledge to design a system.
I suspect that once the discussion is forced to turn from industry buzzwords to actual technical information you won't have much to say, but let's give it a try. Start by pointing out any errors I've made and also the concepts you think are out of my reach that won't allow me to design a system.
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