Anyone who has ever listened to good music on a CD can appreciate the fact that sounds of such clarity and realism can be stored on a plastic disk. Even a full-length movie can now be stored on a similar type of disk (DVD) and the quality of both sound and picture is amazing. The same type of digital technology is applied to the sounds of a Phoenix Organ except that the digital information, instead of being read from a spinning disk is stored in computer memory chips. Each time a note is pressed at the keyboard, the Phoenix computer instantly plays back a digital recording of an organ pipe (or whichever sound is selected by a stop).

Several well-known electronic organ companies do not use real digital sampling. Claims by such companies should be taken with some degree of skepticism. Synthesis, an older technology invented in the 1970's, is still widely used in church organs today, and even though the technology has been up-graded countless times, you may be very surprised at the inaccuracy of organ pipe emulation. When real-time, long, artistic sampling is applied to organ pipes, a very high degree of  realism can be attained. Never before has sampling technology been taken so far specifically for the church organ.

Phoenix Organs records ranks of organ pipes in the actual churches and concert halls that house these instruments. The pipes are not carted away to an anechoic chamber in a factory or lab but are recorded note by note on the pipe chests and in the acoustics they were originally voiced for.

The sampling rate on a Phoenix Organ is the same as for CDs. The sample rate is usually 44.1kHz although we often go as high as 48kHz. Once the digital recordings of the pipes are made they are then edited before being stored in the memory of the organ. This is one of the most important parts of building a Phoenix organ. A very critical musical ear with great sensitivity to the details of pipe organ sound is required to do such work, to say nothing of the patience required. In fact, many consider sampling to be an art once they have noticed the differing qualities of sound between organ manufacturers. Editing pipe samples involves the judicious removal of unwanted background noise caused by air leaks and blower rumble as exists in many older pipe organs as well as the removal of typical street traffic noise heard in many churches. We must also 'loop' each pipe recording. Looping allows, for example, a pipe recorded for 5 seconds to play indefinitely without any noticeable repetition.

With Phoenix instruments we do an absolute minimum of work on the original recordings in order to keep as close as possible to the original natural pipe sounds, but equally important is the management of all samples so that they end up successfully representing the original organ stops across the entire keyboard. Beyond this, the sampled stops must blend together to provide a cohesive instrument. This is all very painstaking work involving much skill that is reminiscent of the work of great pipe organ builders. It is no wonder that so many noted organists, even pipe organ purists, continue to be impressed with Phoenix organs because they are hearing organ pipes through the speakers. The Phoenix organ computer was designed from the beginning to either control an actual pipe organ and/or produce sampled pipe sounds.

Every note of a rank of pipes is recorded, but not all are normally used. Many of the old organs we record are considered masterpieces of organ building yet many have some pipes that are either choked with dirt or the tone may be slightly deteriorated in some other way. This does not necessarily make the organs sound poor overall and fortunately for Phoenix there is no need to depend on having one recording for every note of every stop to get a good representation of a whole rank of pipes. The Phoenix system is capable of filling in the blanks.

While we usually record pipes in stereo, we normally prefer not to playback in stereo. The stereo effect of individual pipe recordings is most often lost due to the necessity of placing organ speakers at some distance from the listeners. Speakers 'producing' organ tones make a very crude sound compared to home stereo speakers that 're-produce' the refined sounds of, for example, a symphony orchestra. A church organ needs to fill the room with sound and support congregational singing without being over-bearing or "getting on your nerves" and one method Phoenix uses to attain this is by assigning individual notes to certain loudspeakers. It is not at all like a home stereo. A church organ should sound like an actual pipe organ rather than just a recording of one. The Phoenix sample assignment feature also allows the voicer to select from a number of 'Virtual Pipe Chest Layouts'.

Hearing is believing. Contact a Phoenix representative to receive a demonstration CD or, better still, play a Phoenix as soon as you can to see for yourself. The quality is obvious and we welcome side-by-side comparisons.