26 Jun
2000
26 Jun
'00
6:49 p.m.
On Mon, Jun 26, 2000 at 11:12:22AM -0500, Charles P. Hobbs (SoCalTip) wrote:
I saw another organ like that once, Gulbransen maybe.
Did any home
organs have computers with floppies, etc. inside them?
Not until the mid-90's. On the other hand, there was a "Marantz
Reproducing Piano" that was like a player piano, but used digital signals
on a casette tape rather than the punched paper rolls.
http://www.mninter.net/~mfontana/pc2mid/desc.html
Some of the Allen Organs had a digital system where the tone quality was
determined by an 80-column punched computer card, but these were high-end
instruments, not really home organs. (Someone over on the Electronic
Organ List hacked this system, and determined just how the cards were
supposed to be punched in order to produce a certain sound)
Yep, a church I used to go to had one of those. It was quite a nice-
sounding organ; big too, with two large manuals and 3 octaves or so of
pedals. The cards were just for new add-on sounds (and I'm sure they
made plenty of extra money from them); it had a large complement of
built-in sounds selected by the typical flip-switches. The cards were
made of plastic for durability. I think they must've used an optical
matrix to read the entire card at once, because you didn't have to feed
it in at any particular speed; just stick it in a slot and take it back
out again. I suspect it must've used an advanced form of FM synthesis;
the amount of data to define a sound that way would be about right for
a punch card. But it sounded way better than say a Yamaha DX7.
--
_______ Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD ecloud(a)bigfoot.com
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