On Mon, Jun 26, 2000 at 11:12:22AM -0500, Charles P. Hobbs (SoCalTip) wrote:
> > 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
I saw another organ like that once, Gulbransen maybe.
>
> 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.
--
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Received on Mon Jun 26 2000 - 17:49:07 BST