Erich Clark

Hey, all!

TL;DR:

Feeding the Allen's own, internal RCA connections to your mixer through DI boxes will cost you about $200 for fantastic results. New speakers and mics will be brutally difficult, cost several thousand dollars, take a very long time, and provide inferior results.

 

Long Story:

We are in the midst of upgrades ourselves and are seeking similar solutions. We upgraded to a digital mixer last year and now we are attempting to capture and perhaps stream one or more of our services in HD, but we need to capture the audio from our classic 90's Allen organ. I'm with the musicians on this one- the organ is an astounding human musical interface; there is nothing else like it. Hang on to it!!

A- (Several $K, dubious results) The mic'd system will require new speakers, maybe new amps, expensive installations, visual clutter, and to do it right, several mics in odd places around the room. For example, in our Sanctuary, our organ feeds its own 8 speaker cabinets, and all of them have internal crossovers and three speakers each. That means there are 24 separate speakers in there, all pointing in different directions. Mic'ing and mixing it right (on video) would take serious production magic and plenty of money. You would spend several thousand dollars, easy. 

If you are going to spend money on speakers, then upgrade your house mains that you use all the time!

B- ($200, fantastic results) A direct system would take existing RCA outs from the Allen (think red and white connectors on your old component stereo system) to DI boxes and out to XLRs (regular 3-pin microphone cables). You could probably get the whole rig for less than $200 in pristine quadraphonic. 

My first choice would be a set of stereo RCA DI boxes like the ART CleanBox Pro.  Allen organs use RCAs to pass line level signals to their amps and they also potentially have dedicated outputs from what I see. (More below) You would want those DI boxes as close as possible to the Allen, running XLRs back to your mixer (XLRs are great at rejecting interference). There are power outlets inside your organ, so you can use a small power supply inside to run the AC adapter for the ARTs, and I would be tempted to mount them inside the organ case.

Cracking the back cover of our Allen (an MDS 26 from 1995), there are several promising leads. 

1- On the floor of the case, there are two pairs of RCAs that clearly read "out". If those work at line level like an old stereo system, that would give us quadraphonic sound right there. I plan to test this out tomorrow with our organist, just to see what the levels are like.

2- Failing that, there is a spot for a 6-pin "P945 Headphone / Tape out" on a rear panel. I'm pretty confident we could do something with this as well, similar to the above setup but with the extra step of pin to RCA conversion and some connector soldering. No big deal, though admittedly sad because this would only be stereo.

3- You could divert the RCAs before the amplifier, completely disusing the Allen amp, so once again you have RCAs that you can DI box to your board. We won't be doing this, since the speakers that our Allen tech installed work wonderfully well. We just need signal for recording and broadcast.

Like I said, we're in the middle of this ourselves, so I will let you know what else I can find out. 

I hope this helps, and God Bless you!

 

PS- There is an Option C that is very outside the box- if you have a digital Allen, then you have the option of using your organ as a MIDI instrument, voicing it from a powerful computer. Not exactly a cheap option, but a very intriguing one.