The Baldwin Organ Story, written in 2008 by John ? from Arkansas.
This article was copied from the Organ Forum web site:
As a church organ builder, Baldwin is now defunct. However, the company was once a major player in that market, witness the large number of old analog Baldwin organs still in service.
Baldwin organs were primarily built in Fayetteville, Arkansas until the early 90's, I believe. Some were assembled in the Cincinnati, Ohio plant as well.
There were several phases in Baldwin's organ-building history. They were one of the early producers of analog electronic organs and built some good-sized organs back in the 1950's and 60's, some of which survive to this day.
Early models were vacuum tube, then they converted to transistors. These models all used the 12-master-oscillator-divider scheme. They recognized the drawback of this lock-step tuning and incorporated various devices including long, multi-stranded reverb springs and rotating speaker vanes to give the sound more activity. In the 60's they came up with the "tone expander" system which applied a kind of delay and detune effect to the sound, It made these lock-step organs sound much bigger, as if there were multiple ranks of oscillators at work.
In the late 60's and early 70's they built some very large and elaborate organs with multiple sets of master oscillators and sophisticated diode and transistor keying circuitry. These models went head to head with Rodgers and Allen analogs and had some nice features and good sound.
Around this time they also experimented with an exotic system using actual pipe organ tones optically recorded onto whirling disks and read by optical sensors. This was "sampling" and "looping" using what amounted to analog hardware borrowed from the film industry. It produced astounding reproductions of real pipe sounds, but alas, it was just too complex and clunky. They built a few dozen of these "Opus" organs, but I doubt that any are still in service today.
In the 70's they switched from the 12 master oscillators to a single master clock with "top octave synthesis" and IC dividers. The cheapest organs in the line at that time had no tone expander circuitry, so these models sounded pretty dead. However, for the larger models they used a system they called "rate scaling" to derive as many as 4 or 5 separate top octave frequency sets from a single high frequency clock.
This rate scaling technology gave their higher-end church models a degree of pitch independence that rivaled the multiple rank sound of Allen and Rodgers analogs. There could even be a true celeste rank with this system. All these subtly out-of-tune generator sets were linked to that single master clock, so transposing the whole organ was a matter of simply altering that clock frequency. Many of these models, such as the big 636 and 645, were truly wonderful and ahead of their time in many ways.
When everyone went digital in the late 80's, Baldwin designed and built in the USA a series of rather good digital church organs. I happen to own one of these, a model D422, from about 1989. I have written about it several times on this forum, and you might be able to search for that if you're interested in details. There are several of these instruments in my service area and I play them frequently. They are pretty good, especially considering their age. They probably sound about as good as what Allen was doing at the same time and have some nice unique features, full MIDI capability, etc.
The Baldwin company was in bad shape financially by this time, though, due to various factors including bad management and some needless diversification of the company into such sidelines as grandfather clocks and bank financing. They didn't have the money or the will to continue developing their digital organ in the US, so they began importing Italian organs around 1990 and slapping their own name on them.
The D-911 D912 are one of the early imported models. At first they imported Galanti organs and put the name "Howard" on them -- which was one of their piano brands. Later they turned to Viscount to build their organs which they sold under the Baldwin and Wurlitzer names. I think the D-912 is a Viscount model, but I'm not certain. The Galanti and Viscount systems are much alike anyway.
These organs have a pretty decent sound, especially the larger models. They were early adopters of true sampling, and they have better attack transients (chiff) than some American organs of the same era. If there is a downside, it's the "European" tone quality which doesn't appeal to everyone's ears.
The small ones are pretty cheap both in sound and construction, and I know of some that have been junked already. The D-912 is one of the better ones that I've seen and may be reliable enough for a practice organ. I know of one in the chapel of a retirement village that is giving excellent service. The biggest problem we've had with it has been the erratic and scratchy volume knobs.
Obviously, a company that doesn't even have the resources to do its own design and manufacturing is not on a stable footing, and Baldwin eventually collapsed. They went bankrupt and were sold to Gibson, the company that makes guitars and drums and such. Gibson totally disowned all the organs and digital pianos, leaving a lot of instruments orphaned.
Viscount continues to provide parts and support for the organs they made under the Baldwin name. Music Electronics in Springdale, Arkansas provides parts, manuals, and technical support for all the older Baldwins, all analogs, all US-built digital models, and even to some extent the Galanti-built models. General Music Corp (parent company of Galanti) also has a presence in the US and can provide some assistance on these organs.
John ?
Thank you John for
this article, I don’t know John’s last name
Comments: John, I
hope you don't mind me filling in a few blanks here
Baldwin's fortunes in the organ business began to falter IMHO when they went to using transistors. Their tube jobs were more reliable and sounded better than their first transistor efforts such as Model 11. They increasingly lost out in the marketplace after Allen introduced their digital (MOS-1) organs. Even so, they came out periodically with interesting organs. One such organ was the 640, with a good spec., moving drawstop console that was reasonably well constructed, had as many as 16 audio channels. It even sounded good, and is today still respectable. As you mention in the 80s they produced the 636 and 645 (3 manual ) organs, which were decent but not great. By the mid 80s Allen had improved on the MOS-1 stuff and Rodgers better efforts, such as 870 and 925 were considered better than Baldwin's efforts. Added to the fact that Baldwin ran into financial trouble, and you can see that they were losing the battle to stay in the marketplace.
In the late 70s, the organs with the optical waveform pickups, were called the Baldwin Multi Waveform organ. I heard a recording of one, and it sounded good, but somewhat like an early digital. They only made a few of them, and because they were hugely expensive and were a servicing nightmare, were discontinued after only a few years. My guess is that only a handfull, if that are still functioning.
Fast forwarding to the late 80s, Baldwin came out with 3 digital models, of which yours is one. I thought they were good for their time, perhaps the orchestral section being the best. However they were expensive, and didn't sell well. About the same time Baldwin struck an agreement with General Music, to be exclusive distributor in North America for the new digital organs that they developed. That agreement seemed to have been broken by General Music about 6 months later, when they setup an independant distribution channel called Galanti Organ builders, headed by some ex-Rodgers executives. The Baldwin folks were not impressed, and so, around late 1988 they went to Viscount, who by that time had reverse engineered the Galanti Praeludium organs, which they were selling as D900 and D910. The Viscount models were I believe D911, D912, C250, C300. They sounded good, if you liked European sounding organs, but had a common failing--bad power supplies. The 5vdc line usually went down the river after a few years, as the Darlington transistor got fried through thermal cycling. In other words, the voltage regulator ran way too hot, and eventually failed.
Baldwin's fortunes in the organ business began to falter IMHO when they went to using transistors. Their tube jobs were more reliable and sounded better than their first transistor efforts such as Model 11. They increasingly lost out in the marketplace after Allen introduced their digital (MOS-1) organs. Even so, they came out periodically with interesting organs. One such organ was the 640, with a good spec., moving drawstop console that was reasonably well constructed, had as many as 16 audio channels. It even sounded good, and is today still respectable. As you mention in the 80s they produced the 636 and 645 (3 manual ) organs, which were decent but not great. By the mid 80s Allen had improved on the MOS-1 stuff and Rodgers better efforts, such as 870 and 925 were considered better than Baldwin's efforts. Added to the fact that Baldwin ran into financial trouble, and you can see that they were losing the battle to stay in the marketplace.
In the late 70s, the organs with the optical waveform pickups, were called the Baldwin Multi Waveform organ. I heard a recording of one, and it sounded good, but somewhat like an early digital. They only made a few of them, and because they were hugely expensive and were a servicing nightmare, were discontinued after only a few years. My guess is that only a handfull, if that are still functioning.
Fast forwarding to the late 80s, Baldwin came out with 3 digital models, of which yours is one. I thought they were good for their time, perhaps the orchestral section being the best. However they were expensive, and didn't sell well. About the same time Baldwin struck an agreement with General Music, to be exclusive distributor in North America for the new digital organs that they developed. That agreement seemed to have been broken by General Music about 6 months later, when they setup an independant distribution channel called Galanti Organ builders, headed by some ex-Rodgers executives. The Baldwin folks were not impressed, and so, around late 1988 they went to Viscount, who by that time had reverse engineered the Galanti Praeludium organs, which they were selling as D900 and D910. The Viscount models were I believe D911, D912, C250, C300. They sounded good, if you liked European sounding organs, but had a common failing--bad power supplies. The 5vdc line usually went down the river after a few years, as the Darlington transistor got fried through thermal cycling. In other words, the voltage regulator ran way too hot, and eventually failed.
The author is John Birdsong.
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