Product Spotlight: Direct Streaming Technology

All of Rodgers’ current organs are equipped with our latest technology: Direct Streaming, or DS Core technology.

With the first generations of digital sampled organs, samples needed to be stored inside the organ, therefore some sort of permanent digital memory was needed. This was very expensive and also very limited in size; thus, many techniques were employed to reduce the size of the samples. For example, only one note’s recording (or a few at the most) of a single stop were stored inside the organ and all notes for that stop were generated based on this one recording. Also, the length of the recording was made as short as possible. And although this was already a huge step forward compared to analog organs, the compromises that had to be made were still huge. There was still a clear audible difference with a real pipe organ.

As permanent memory became cheaper, it became possible to store more and longer samples inside the organ. This increased the sound quality significantly. In fact, it is easily possible to store a relatively long recording for every key and every stop. This allows for the most accurate reproduction of pipe organ sound ever.

For older digital system technologies to fully use these samples, they need to be ‘read’ and then copied to the ‘working memory’ first. And although the reading process has become faster, the increase of data capacity has gone even faster, meaning that it still may take significant time to read all the data. For example, it could still take up to 5 minutes before all the data is read and ready to be used. Imagine you would have to wait this long when you power on your organ before you can play!

Our revolutionary Direct Streaming technology solves this problem. Instead of reading and copying all the data to the working memory first, it is capable of playing (streaming) samples directly from the permanent storage in real-time without delay and without interruptions. It allows the time needed to start up the organ to be reduced to approximately 10 seconds. Hundreds of Voice Palette^TM  optional stops are all instantly available as a complete organ type or individual stops. No upload or download delays occur when selecting any Voice Palette^TM stop to play. There is no need for ‘borrowing’ or ‘unification’ in the organ’s tonal specification.

The storage hardware used for Direct Streaming is industrial grade, providing a longer lifetime compared to consumer electronics which are often used in PC-based solutions.

Our largest organ, the Rodgers Infinity Series 489, has a total of 531 onboard stops, all instantly available to the organist! For each of our organs, our Direct Streaming technology allows each organ stop and orchestral voice to be note-by-note voiceable via onboard controls of the organ – no need to connect an external computer to the organ. The adjustments are made and heard in real-time, instantly without delay, without enduring wasted time to repower the organ in order to hear the adjustment. Note-by-note voicing includes level, tuning, low-gain, mid-range, and high-gain controls, authentic pipe organ wind supply control, random tuning sensitivity control, tremulant depth and speed control, harmonic content control, pipe layout reproduction, and up to 5 parametric equalizers per channel.

Where some of our competitors have switched to alternate technologies to avoid the challenges associated with huge sample sets, Direct Streaming has embraced and combined the best of many worlds: huge sample sets, fast startup times, and long-term reliability – all to give the best possible sound!