Right from its conception, the Phoenix System was designed to be used with both pipe organs and electronic organs or a combination of both. Hybrid organs (mixing pipes and sampled stops in one organ) are very successful due to several outstanding features:
Every Phoenix console is capable of controlling pipes. The same 'front-end' is used for scanning of keyboards, stops, pistons, etc. for both the sample playback system and pipe magnets. The speed of the scanning is extremely fast and a separate microprocessor is used for each keyboard. It is actually done in parallel as opposed to the linear (all in a row) scanning of many console systems. With the Phoenix system there is no sluggishness of the key response as more stops are added. Pipes may easily be added to any Phoenix organ at any time.