Late last year, I acquired a Kawai DX1900, which had been bought new for $6,000 (I think they made it in the 1970s and maybe the earlier 1980s), for $100. (This is AUD; in today’s money, that was probably an initial purchase price of around $20,000–50,000.) My acoustic piano has been feeling rather neglected since: I’ve been playing the organ much more. It’s interesting to experiment with just how different organs and pianos are as instruments. It’s also fun seeing the quirks and failure modes of analogue electronics—things are much more likely to keep working, just a little less well, whereas in digital electronics things largely work perfectly or not at all. The top manual is supposed to be mildly pressure-sensitive in ways that tweak the synthesiser mode (e.g. press hard for vibrato), but this doesn’t appear to work any more, and the lowest note goes haywire with the frequency it emits (but only in synthesiser mode, not in percussion mode which doesn’t use the pressure-sensitivity). Also switches that you’d expect to have two positions actually turn out to have a third unintended one when they’re between the two positions, when it’s turned off one behaviour but not turned on the other, or has turned on both. All up the organ is 144kg (plus another 16kg for the stool and 26kg for the pedal board). Analogue electronics and solid construction and very powerful speakers (in the room I use it, I keep the master volume around 30%, and even at that point it’s capable of being oppressively loud) and a Leslie speaker and such ain’t light.

Pity pipe organs take so much space. I’d like one or two.