Designed and developed by organists ...for organists

The sound generation process in a Phoenix Organ uses the sample replay technique. The starting point is with a digital recording of a rank of real organ pipes. A selection is made of these, covering five octaves, for programming into our sound card. A Phoenix sound card has 64 generators, each of which can replay one sample at a time. If eight stops are assigned to a single sound card, this will allow up to eight notes to be played with all stops drawn simultaneously. However, the number of stops on a sound  card is normally limited to five. Not only does this increase the polyphony of the instrument, it also yields much better sound quality. Some stops can utilize up to forty to fifty or more long samples - virtually one per note, which is particularly important for flutes which contain complex and uneven starting transients (chiff). This ensures that these transients are naturally re-created from the original pipe itself. The use of multiple samples also avoids the "chromatic whistling" effect which seriously flaws the sound if too few samples are used.

Stop lists can, at times, be pretty meaningless, and we have all experienced the disappointment when the sound emanating from the organ does not match one's expectations from the engraving on the drawknob. This applies as much to pipe organs as electronic ones. For this reason, the voicing software has tremendous control over the sound and timbre of each individual note for each stop. Even though the Phoenix voicing software has the capability of turning a Lieblich Gedeckt into a Stopped Diapason, it is better to start with the correct sample in the first place.

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