Why organ music

it may just be a case of lousy mastering. i have several discs by charles earland, yes, brian auger,etc where its comparison to lp is very very close. on the other hand, most of my jimmy smith cd's suck(sonically) and the original lp's have much better sonic character

The organ has an abundance of harmonics. Organs can all sound different depending on the pipe designs. Perhaps there is something about the harmonic content from vinyl that improves the organ sound in the direction of your taste(usually greater than CD because Vinyl uses a mechanical vibrating system to read the music).

More harmonics sounds richer or fuller....tubes do this too and many speakers add harmonics too, harmonics are pretty much a fact of life.

Another possibility is distortion; all distortion is ugly and organ music requires oodles of power so it is a candidate for distortion...could you be overdriving your system with a CD compared to Vinyl? Just a thought....

Interesting observation. While CDs can, in theory, get the bass notes better than all but the best-cut records, I believe that you're right. Maybe the reason is in part that the recorded space for most organs is a big part of their sound and is usually quite reverberant. This can lead to some overtones becoming a bit strident and bright in the frequency range where digital has its weaknesses, perhaps? Also, I find that redbook digital's inability to capture the last "tail" of a note's decay realistically often makes CD organ recordings sound a bit unnatural. I will say that I have heard a lot of very good recordings of organs on CD, most of them being more recent recordings. And the SACD recordings I have of organs sound very close to analog recordings, with better bass reproduction to boot.

Get yourself a copy of Felix Hell's "Organ Sensation" Reference Recordings RR-101CD.

This is one of the best performed, recorded and mastered organ CDs ever. If this doesn't sound good on your system, you may need to look at your source player.

Thank you all for your well-considered responses. I am definitely not overdriving the system which is 400 watt per and being played at moderate volume. I could be that my CD's of organ are fairly lousy. They are mostly from the very first years CD came out and I particularly dont like the Telarc ones. I will get a copy of Felix Hell's and try that. If anyone else has great CD's of Bach etc to recommend I love to recieve them.
Joe