The VOX Showroom - The Jaguar Organ

Vox!
Jaguar Organ
United States Line

The Jaguar Organ: V304

Vox was really selling the upper end of the combo organ market with the Continental and Super Continental (or Continental II as it was known in Britain). These units were quite expensive-a single Continental debuted in America at $999 in 1964-65, a stiff price indeed, yet with some reason. The Continental uses a rather complcated tone generating circuitry when compared to the other portable organs of the period.
Most electronic organs use "divide down" circuitry to produce the various pitches needed for the organ. Each tone generator has two sections....a master oscillator and the dividers. The job of the master oscillator (M.O.) is to produce the highest tone of that note, say the highest A note that the organ might need. Then the output of the M.O. is routed through a divider that halves the frequency of the M.O., producing an octave lower pitch for the next lower A. This process is repeated as many times as there are octaves in the keybed, and you then have the pitch basis for the organ. Tonal colors are varied in this type of organ by switching in various capacitors that make the tone bright or dark. This is the process used in the Farfisa organs of the 60s period, and the Jaguar.

The Continentals also use a M.O. and seven divider networks, but use a much more complicated system to distribute the divided tones to the keyboards. This requires is a complicated scheme of wiring, routed through something called a distribution board, that allows the Continentals to be more "Hammond" like, with the tonal variations coming not only from a capacitor network (the flute and reed drawbars) like the Farfisas and the Jaguar, but also from being able to select the amount of each footage drawbar you want to form the tone basis. The footage of the drawbars refers to the length of the pipe in a pipe organ, if you weren't familar.

The Continentals also offers a drawbar with harmonic overtones called "IV rank" as it is known in the single keyboard models. The Super Continental (or Continental II) also has "Harmonic Mixture II and III." The IV rank is a mixture of 2 2/3', 2', 1 3/5', and 1' pipe tones....very high pitched, and not on the consonant tone of the key. If each of these pitches were controllable seperately, you would nearly have the equivalent of a Hammond organ.

All of this individual tone capability on the Continental comes at a high cost in manufacturing. Each individual key on the Continental has four key contacts with two "bus bars" for the contacts to touch. On a single Continental, there are 49 keys times 4 contacts each, or 196 key contacts and eight buss bars! The Jaguar only needed one key contact for each note, and two bus bars. The Jaguar also did away with the complicated distributionboard system needed for the Continental.

In a effort to keep the tonality of the organs somewhat similar, the same model transistor was used in the M.O. and dividers of the Jaguar and Continental organs. The Italian Continentals and Jaguars used SFT351 and SFT363 germanium transistors for the tone generators. The Brit organs normally used AC115 and AC155, which were British equivalents.

Consequently, the Jaguar allowed Vox to enter the market with a low price organ that would compete on a price basis with the Farfisa Mini Compact and Combo Compact organs, but would look like the Continental from the audience perspective.

In Europe, many portable organs were manufactured by Farfisa, and their major competitor, JEN (now known as General Music). JEN was making, under private label contract, the Italian production of the Continental and Super Continental organs. You may remember that the president of Thomas Organ, Joe Benaron, was a Canadian, and even proposed moving all of the Vox production to Italy at one point...a super manufacturing plant for exclusive world wide production. JEN also was marketing, under the "Howard" name, a small portable organ. It looked a bit like the Farfisa organs of the period, and had four capactive tone tabs and a simple single note style oscillator/divider package as I described earlier. JEN offered this design to Vox, repackaged into a single Continental case, and the Jaguar was born. Expecting a large demand, Vox actually contracted for three manufacturers to provide the Jaguar. The JEN models had the exact Continental case, including the small gold "T-60 head" style nameplate that faced the musician as he played the keyboard. The rocker tone tabs were slightly dished out in the middle (ala Howard) , andthere was no "contour" (aka treble!) control on these models.

The second manufacturer (sorry, don't know who. ed.) made the lion share of the Jaguars, and these are identifiable by a full width metal logo strip that says "------------------Vox Jaguar---" across the edge on the orange top that faces the musician. These all had the contour control. The rocker tone tabs were flat across the top.

The third manufacturer was the Heathkit Company of Michigan, which sold kits for stereos, radios, etc, that came with an assembly manual and "hours of rewarding fun" building your own. The version sold by Heathkit was version 2 above, and included a "Heathkit" logo on both the orange top and above the Vox Jaguar logo on the nameplate that faced the audience.

The JEN model uses a slightly different circuit baord arrangement from the version two Jaguars, and due to connector style, are not interchangable. The schematic, however, is nearly identical.

The Jaguar doesn't quite have the tonal variations of the Continental, but if you compared both organs "all stops out", they are amazingly alike considering the major difference in complexity between them.

The VOX Showroom!

Photo courtesy Gary Hahlbeck, Sonic Speakers.