High-tech pipe organ to blow minds at famed SF theater

The city's Castro Theatre, known as much for its colorful organ concerts as its quirky film offerings, will house a massive $700,000 pipe-digital hybrid featuring a sample library used in the film industry.

David Hegarty has been the Castro Theatre's principal organist since 1978, and says he can hardly wait to work the levers and switches on the high-tech organ in its new home.
SFCoda

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 thesounds 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."

An artist's rendering of the new, high-tech organ. (Click to enlarge.)
SFCoda

The Castro Theatre, a San Francisco designated landmark, was built in 1922 by