Sound difference between ADC 4300 (I own) and ADC 3100 ( am looking at)

[allaboutthesound]

Hello, I own and love my ADC4300DK .... I have modified the electronics (just the audio chain) and lots of voicing .. sounds great and records very nicely. I am looking at an ADC 3100 for our church ... and I am wondering how similar would the voices be? I realize that the 4300 and 3100 might be quite different inside. Have received the owners manual for the 3100 from Allen for the stoplist and Allen has been great in sending me service literature (service manual stuff) in pdf .

Thanks

[circa1949]

Allen has been great in sending me service literature (service manual stuff) in pdf

Interesting to hear that as the previous common knowledge was that Allen only supplied service lit. for analog organs. If they are now supplying it for MOS & ADC organs, that's a good idea. At any rate, what I was told by a tech is that the service lit. became progressively less useful. (other than, of course, things like voicing charts) By the end of the ADC era the techs were expected to do very little hard field repair at least to the boards, but just to have a suite of standby boards to swap for replacement. Certainly someone skilled in electronics would not need schematics to repair fairly standard things like amps and power supplies.

I think the ADC-4300 would no doubt sound better, it had many more DACs overall, feeding more real channels of analog audio that were then mixed down to 4 channels. With an 8 bit DAC having as many as possible helps hide the limitation of the quantization scheme. It was also the later MADC-3/TG-10 era with more realistic chiff, though that is more helpful in a large acoustic setting like a church. Overall pretty similar though...they both had 4 final output channels....the 4300 probably has a sub crossover which will help with bass, I believe it needed that as it had a 32' stop.

[m&m's]

Having owned a 4300, and having demonstrated on the 3100, they are not the same. As the above post noted, the 4300 had more circuit boards and real audio channels, a larger card cage, and a somewhat clearer sound. But the 3100 certainly had an acceptable sound, and in a church setting could be very effective.

[allaboutthesound]

Thanks for your information..... The 4300 was easily changed to 6 channels (mixer is 7 plus 2 reverb channels) .. I do most mixing and reverb externally anyhow so as long as the 3100 tone generation is reasonable, all should be good. Thanks again for your insights

[myorgan]

Thanks for your information..... The 4300 was easily changed to 6 channels (mixer is 7 plus 2 reverb channels) .. I do most mixing and reverb externally anyhow so as long as the 3100 tone generation is reasonable, all should be good. Thanks again for your insights

Thank you for the information about splitting the channels from 4 to 6. I'm planning to do that to my organ this summer, and it's nice to know it was completed successfully with another 4300.

Michael

[m&m's]

No problem at all to run six channels on the 4000 series. The 5000's had exactly the same cage and mixer setup, and they came standard with six channels. However, those two extra channels were for the pedals, and I didn't see any real value in splitting them off from the Great channels with which they were combined. Now, if you could have run the Great through four channels, with the Pedal combined with all four, that would have been a great sounding organ.

[allaboutthesound]

No problem at all to run six channels on the 4000 series. The 5000's had exactly the same cage and mixer setup, and they came standard with six channels. However, those two extra channels were for the pedals, and I didn't see any real value in splitting them off from the Great channels with which they were combined. Now, if you could have run the Great through four channels, with the Pedal combined with all four, that would have been a great sounding organ.

Indeed, but I found it a wonderful thing to be able to balance the Pedal against the Great and to use specific speakers better suited for the pedal .... it would be quite simple to parallel the Great and Pedal on (the same) four channels but I would think this would remove a lot of voicing ability. Just my thought .... and the Gt/ped stops wouldn't get a chance to acoustically blend if they were same channel paralleled ...