In this article an attempt is made to investigate the characteristic sound of the organ produced by the famous, 19th-century French organ maker Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811-1899), who made over 500 instruments, of which many were constructed outside France. He produced both small organs for liturgical purposes, and concert instruments in which he realised his own technical and sonorous ideas in the spirit inherited from the romantic era. The analysis considers instruments produced in various periods of Cavaillé-Coll's lifetime, namely 19 one-manual and 22 two-manual instruments. The characteristic of their particular sound-combinations, dispositions of registers, voices etc. allows one to draw the conclusion that Cavaillé-Coll followed his own, idealistic model of sound. It was exactly this model which served as a basis for practical dispositions of voices in the majority of his instruments, which were to imitate the sound of a symphony orchestra and contributed to the development of the so-called French symphonic organ school.
