Bad news for San Francisco's historic Castro Theatre, site of many a film festival and celebrity-studded special event: the iconic pipe organ that's entertained audiences there since the early '80s is packing up and leaving town.
Great news for the famed theater: "The Mighty Wurlitzer" is getting replaced by a crazy high-tech pipe-digital hybrid that can reproduce the sounds of the familiar organ, plus those of a full symphony orchestra -- in virtually any musical genre, and in ear-ringing surround sound.
"An all-pipe organ of this magnitude would cost many millions of dollars and would be physically impossible to install in this theater," explains SFCoda, a nonprofit made up of music devotees dedicated to bringing the fancy new organ to life. "Fortunately, cutting-edge digital sampling technology now allows us to greatly enlarge the resources of the instrument and dynamically distribute the sound throughout the auditorium, providing a thrilling surround-sound musical experience in an acoustically reverberatory environment appropriate to whatever style of music is being played."
