[David[_19_]]

A generous parishioner has offered to buy and donate a Lowery SU500
Royale organ to a small old New England church with an interior volume
of perhaps 50,000 cubic feet. This Lowery is an elaborate and
expensive electronic organ with built-in speakers.

To this picky audiophile, the sound seemed to have disappointing
distortion and dynamic and frequency range, and it did not project
especially well from under the console. The small, carpeted, highly-
damped showroom contributed to the problem. The other five [non-
audiophile] listeners acknowledged the projection issue but thought it
sounded otherwise fine. Everyone thought we might want some extension
speakers.

Does anyone have suggestions for suitable extension speakers for this
electronic organ? I am wary of speakers from Lowery because of what
I heard from the console. The store owner said the Lowery's speakers
were made by Bose-not the answer I wanted to hear.

Despite my misgivings, this organ is an improvement over what the
church now has, and it will also solve important space problems in the
church. An alternative to this Lowery does not seem to be in the
cards.

We would certainly first try the organ without any additional speakers
in the church, but if we decide to consider extension speakers, I'd
like to be ready with some alternative suggestions offered by
knowledgeable audiophiles like you.

[Audio Empire]

On Tue, 13 Jul 2010 16:41:37 -0700, David wrote
(in article ):

A generous parishioner has offered to buy and donate a Lowery SU500
Royale organ to a small old New England church with an interior volume
of perhaps 50,000 cubic feet. This Lowery is an elaborate and
expensive electronic organ with built-in speakers.

To this picky audiophile, the sound seemed to have disappointing
distortion and dynamic and frequency range, and it did not project
especially well from under the console. The small, carpeted, highly-
damped showroom contributed to the problem. The other five [non-
audiophile] listeners acknowledged the projection issue but thought it
sounded otherwise fine. Everyone thought we might want some extension
speakers.

Does anyone have suggestions for suitable extension speakers for this
electronic organ? I am wary of speakers from Lowery because of what
I heard from the console. The store owner said the Lowery's speakers
were made by Bose-not the answer I wanted to hear.

Despite my misgivings, this organ is an improvement over what the
church now has, and it will also solve important space problems in the
church. An alternative to this Lowery does not seem to be in the
cards.

We would certainly first try the organ without any additional speakers
in the church, but if we decide to consider extension speakers, I'd
like to be ready with some alternative suggestions offered by
knowledgeable audiophiles like you.

I don't know much about Lowery organs (I have heard of them, though). But
just off the top of my head, I'd say that you need to be careful about
jumping to conclusions. The distortion you heard can be the result of any of
a number of things:

1) With a huge volume to fill, the amp in the organ just may be too small
requiring you to turn it up to near clipping to get enough level in that
large a space.

2) Related to number 1, the speakers in the cabinet may not be good enough to
provide sufficient loudness without being driven beyond their linear
excursion. This would cause the speaker to break-up and distort.

3) If either 1 or 2 (or both) is the problem, then just adding extension
speakers really won't help very much, if at all. since both of the other
problems would still exist. IOW, if the amp in the organ is too small to
provide adequate sound levels with the speakers it has, then it is unlikely
that it could drive extensions either.

What you may need to do is to get a larger amplifier and some decent
auxiliary speakers to fill the space needed with that organ and don't use the
ones that came in the console. .

[Walt]

David wrote:
A generous parishioner has offered to buy and donate a Lowery SU500
Royale organ to a small old New England church with an interior volume
of perhaps 50,000 cubic feet. This Lowery is an elaborate and
expensive electronic organ with built-in speakers.


...if we decide to consider extension speakers, I'd
like to be ready with some alternative suggestions offered by
knowledgeable audiophiles like you.

This falls within the realm of "musical instrument amplifiers" rather
than "high fidelity" components. For amplified musical instruments, the
amp/speaker combo is part of the sound and is chosen specifically
because it changes or colors the sound. Think of the Fender Twin or the
Hammond Leslie speaker - you wouldn't want to listen to recordings on
either of these, but the distortions and colorations are essential to
that certain "sound".

I'm not familiar with Lowery organs, so I don't know what they are
supposed to sound like, but my hunch is that if you simply tapped the
signal and fed it to a high-fidelity speaker you wouldn't get the
"sound" of the Lowery. Whether this is a problem or not would be a
matter of taste. One approach that would preserve the "sound" would be
to place a microphone in front of the speaker and run that through a PA
system. Another would be to get some organ speaker(s) such as a Hammond
Leslie and run it through them.

So, I suppose the question is what do you want it to sound like? The
classic church organ has pipes all over the place in a highly
reverberant space so it sounds like the organ is coming at you from
everywhere at once. Is that what you're going for?

//Walt