St. Paul's Lutheran Church

The Allen Organ Company

The Allen Organ Company was founded in 1937 by Jerome Markowitz, who dedicated his life to producing realistic and affordable pipe sound through technological innovation and advancement. Today, more than a hundred patents and seven decades later, Allen sound is unsurpassed in its pipe-like realism. In 1969, Allen Organ Company partnered with North American Rockwell on a project that went on to change the world of music. Using technology developed for the Apollo Space Program, the companies packed the power of thousands of transistors into 1/16 of a square inch and used those transistor functions to store pipe sounds. For the first time, an electronic instrument recreated actual pipe organ sound using digital technology instead of merely imitating it with the older, analog method. It was the birth of sampling and the basis for virtually every recorded sound we listen to today. 

To create pure pipe sounds, Markowitz learned that the microphone needed to be placed very close to each pipe, which also offered the optimal signal-to-noise ratio for the recordings. These pure sounds could then be processed, as all sample sounds must be prior to being stored in a digital organ, without the distortions and extraneous room noises. This “Dry Sampling” technique, which Allen continues to use to this day, allows the digital sounds to be individually voiced as a pipe technician needs to voice individual pipes. 

Allen’s latest GeniSys™ Technology features not only advanced digital tone generation, but a user-friendly touchscreen interface, convolution acoustics, smart phone accessibility/ Wi-Fi connectivity, and 250 dynamic (changeable) high-definition voices. In addition, through proprietary voicing software and its SoundMatrix™ Library, Allen voicers can meet the tastes and expectations of even the most demanding organist. Finally, Allen’s Stoplist Library™ allows organists to explore different schools of organ building including American Classic, English Cathedral, Cavaillé-Coll, Arp Schnitger, Schlicker, Aeolian-Skinner, as well as multiple theatre organ suites, at the touch of a screen. 

Throughout Allen Organ Company’s eight-decade history, it has installed some 80,000 instruments in over 70 countries.