Serviam, If you don't mind my asking, what digital organ did you install?

With regards to the Phoenix organ - Don and Jim Anderson are just an absolute pleasure to work with. The nicest guys. So for me, at least, the working experience with the company has never been an issue.

But of course, regardless of how nice the guys are, the organ has to actually be good... and I can say with certainty that I've never found a finer digital instrument. The speaker system in our church is only 2.1 audio because the space is so small that anything bigger would be ridiculous. But the sub (I believe it's a 15" sub) does true reproduction of 16 hz. We've had to tone down some of the samples and the overall volume just because of the room size.

As far as the samples are concerned, Don samples all the organs himself and creates custom specs for every organ. It's really neat that you can ask him where each stop was sampled from. In fact, he just finished sampling the organ at our local diocese's cathedral and gave us the Gt principal chorus from that set. Very neat to have a little bit of the Cathedral right in our very small (but very alive) parish. They're as high res as can be - and they're dry, so it's not like HW cutting release samples and the resulting terrible sound. (There are a few samples that he has which I'm not the biggest fan of - but we just don't put them in instruments that I use.)

I've only ever heard one Phoenix that I didn't like, and it happens to be the organ that they don't particularly like either. And that is only because it was never properly voiced - basically all the raw samples were taken in their sharpest and brightest possible form, and the organist ok'd it all because it was part of a restoration and time and space was extremely limited. But with some voicing it could easily be their best organ.

I can't speak to the Acousticubes but I've heard good things about them. What we have at my church are two model 508 speakers which have 180 degree dispersion as opposed to 360. This is a compromise because of the space - but I don't think most churches would even need the acousticubes anyways because usually wall-mounted speakers just look and work better.

In most cases it seems to boil down to speakers. Even less-than-average samples can sound fantastic through great speakers which really fill a room.

When I used to play on a similar tabbed version that was installed in a church about 10 years ago, I defaulted to the American stop list (what is engraved) with a few choice substitutes. I only rarely changed the suite of voices whole sale, although I will experiment with this on this new organ. (I might make Bach speak with a German accent every once-in-a-while.)

One nice thing about these instruments is that when you draw a stop, you can turn a knob that allows you to change to any of the alternate voices that live behind it, without actually changing the whole organ, so in other words: if you like the French cromorne better than the American one, you can activate that alternate voice without changing anything else. This feature I leveraged quite heavily at my previous job. I used to take up to 90 minutes to set pistons every weekend on that organ, because I liked to do all sorts of text painting and reharms at the time. It’s very luxurious, if I’m honest, to play some piece for prelude and get to select whether or not you want to solo on a corno di bassetto, dulzian, or hautbois… you can really craft the sound you wish to have, as though it were a 5 manual organ (not that you activate that many stops, just that you have that breadth of tonal color at your disposal). So I think that's the main takeaway for me at least: it is like having the large box of crayons with all the colors, even though you can only use so many at any given time.

As for the Walker speaker equipment, there are no Walker stops. It’s just that their speaker equipment is bolstering the organ. The Rodgers speakers have been aimed to fire outward, with sister Walker speakers laid on their backs firing up at the ceiling of the chamber to create a more diffuse and enveloping sound. Our rep & installer is apparently friends with the founder of Walker, who told him that having forward-firing and reflection speakers working in tandem is his preferred way to set up an organ, and is apparently what he does with his instruments too.

(I am a big fan of Walkers, having intimate familiarity with one of their installations in Oklahoma. We actually contacted Walker and M&O when we sought bids two years ago, but we were priced out in both cases. At the time, Walker was going to START at 150k and that was if you had a console that was ready to be repurposed, and M&O was going to start closer to 200 with the same conditions.)

PS—And to clarify on my earlier Hauptwerk comment, I did not mean to imply that Rodgers uses wet samples that are truncated. I believe they are doing the same thing as Phoenix; I just meant that the concept of streaming pipe-by-pipe samples of real organs in real time was the same. I also know that Allen has upgraded their samples about a year or two ago. I stumbled across a demo video where they compared the old and new versions of the same stop; the new versions were substantially improved over their older generation of tech.