[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