When we changed from Bradford technology to WpX it was not easy and I don’t mean technically but, like a good marriage we were emotionally involved: we had after all been commissioned to engineer Bradford back in the eighties while it was still a collection of boards in a lab. This though was such a major improvement, that it simply could not be ignored. The success of recent Wyvern WpX installations are a testament to this decision and have, I believe, justified our metamorphosis.

The lack of chorus and voicing control make conventional sampling systems unsuited for custom building. To preserve the characteristic real time chorus and ensemble of pipe ranks samples would now have to be considerably longer than existing systems, requiring sophisticated hardware and large memory devices. Although this would make the system relatively expensive to produce, the principle objective of WpX was to achieve optimum tonal quality. After all, several companies already produce perfectly acceptable sampled organs at a reasonable cost -here was a different ambition - simply to build the most pipe-like organs, irrespective of financial constraints.

WpX allows an organ to be regulated for pitch and volume, note by note, over every stop, plus full control over transient tone such as chiff and other extraneous pipe noise. Mixture ranks can be added and compositions changed, pistons can be given different functions - even the slump of wind bellows can be replicated. It can provide whatever tonal palate you wish: Romantic, Baroque, French or English; it is the most flexible system available being easily alterable even after the organ has been built - making it the ideal platform for custom building.

The hardware architecture can also be configured to suit each application. The system is modular, built upon back planes with a number of programmable plug-in voicing cards that accord to the ranks and specification of the organ. This then allows further opportunity to add additional stops in the future and will also accept different memory devices to take advantage of technology improvements.

Audio can also be controlled by software, and stops can be assigned to different parts of the speaker system by just a few clicks on the computer. Indeed, the individual semitones of stops can be arranged to replicate different shapes of pipe rank - either in ascending or descending order or any other permutation. Above all it is the overall sound of these instruments that is so impressive. Expensive, yes, but still just a fraction of the cost of a new pipe-organ or modest rebuild. More importantly, these organs will stand comparison, not with just any pipe organ, but with some of the best examples ever produced. We believe that WpX allied with high quality has enabled us at Wyvern to produce the most authentic-sounding instrument available today.