Organist Roger Nyquist has crossed a line.

It's the same line that Bob Dylan crossed in the 1960s when he swapped his acoustic guitar for an electric.

In Nyquist's case, it's embracing the digital organ. After playing the traditional pipe organ for decades, Nyquist is keen on the digital version. And as the quality gets better, the digital organ is beginning to give the regal pipe organ a run for its money.

Audiences will get a chance to decide for themselves how a digital organ stacks up to its piped ancestor on Sunday at Sacramento's Sacred Heart Church. For the afternoon concert, Nyquist will perform with Schola Cantorum. The program ranges from the Preludes of J.S. Bach to a transcendent organ work by Olivier Messiaen.

The concert is part of a yearlong celebration dubbed the International Year of the Organ by the American Guild of Organists. The organization is bent on popularizing the instrument known as the "king of instruments" and now more than 2,000 years old.

On Sunday, 250 organ concerts will be held across the country in all 50 states. In Sacramento, Nyquist will be joined by organist Scott Nelson (see box) as area participants in that celebration.

It would be tempting to think that Nyquist is a wild-eyed early adopter of edgy digital technology. But digital organs have been around since 1971, when the Pennsylvania-based Allen Organ Co. introduced its first version.

Digital organs use sampling, a process by which recorded sounds are stored digitally for accurate sound reproduction. Digital sampling offers a wide palette of sound choices, and the sound can be tailored to its environment.

At Sacred Heart, the organ comes with an "acoustic portrait" sampled from the 167-year-old Cavaillé-Coll organ at the Basilica of Saint Denis in Paris, France.

Nyquist started playing the digital organ eight years ago when the Allen Organ Co. asked him to concertize and record on their digital instruments.

"That started it all," he said.

One of the great charms of the digital organ is its lower cost, said Nyquist. A digital organ like the Quantum Allen Organ at Sacred Heart Church costs between $75,000 and $80,000. An equivalent pipe organ would cost nearly $1 million, he said.

Another benefit of the digital organ is the way the stops on the organ can be tweaked. It's a process that can be done from a laptop computer.

"We spent days getting the sound right," said Nyquist, who was involved in the organ's voicing at Sacred Heart. He dedicated the organ in 2006.

"It took two to three days just to change the stops and get it balanced," he said. Each stop took five minutes to load into the organ's memory. Once loaded, the sound had to be regulated and balanced. Getting the sound right took nearly two weeks.

"On a pipe organ, this would take months," Nyquist said.

Not everyone believes that the digital organ is a good fit for a local church, or that they will soon replace pipe organs.

"Digital organs can begin to approximate the sounds of a pipe organ, but what's going to happen to them 10 years from now?" said Margaret Evans, head of community relations for the American Guild of Organists and a practicing organist.

"It's like your computer – you may love your computer, but we all know that soon it will be outdated, and it will be hard to get parts for it," she said.

"I would find it hard to recommend to a church to spend hundred of thousands of dollars for such an instrument," she said. "In 10 or 20 years they're going to have to replace it."

One thing is certain: The pipe organ is still the instrument of choice in the concert hall. And in some cases they give a concert hall much-needed cachet.

One of the boldest examples is the 6,134-pipe organ installed at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The Manuel Rosales Organ Builders instrument was designed in close concert with Disney Hall architect Frank Gehry.

The one-of-a-kind instrument is a powerful symbol not only of the concert hall but of the vibrant classical music scene in Los Angeles. But it came at a premium. The sticker price: $3 million, made possible by a gift from the Toyota Motor Corp.

Call Bee arts critic Edward Ortiz, (916) 321-1071.