Few people have heard of it, yet many consider John Blankenbaker's KENBAK-1 to be the first commercial personal computer.
Synclavier: the ultimate 1980s music production system
By James Grahame
It's a good thing I didn't win a lottery in the 1980s because I would have blown my millions on a New England Digital Synclavier. It just happens to be the most expensive digital music synthesizer/sampler ever created -- a price tag of $200,000+ wasn't uncommon. What you got for your money was a massive rack (or racks) containing a custom-designed 16-bit music computer.
Depending on your wealth, each system offered up to 96 voices of 16-bit sample playback, along with 32 metallic-sounding FM synthesizer voices. A 'direct to disk' recording option to capture vocals and acoustic instruments arrived in the late 1980s. You also got a very geeky looking monochrome graphic terminal to program the beast (eventually replaced by an Apple Mac running terminal emulation software).
The high level features don't tell the full story, though. The earliest Synclaviers were relatively straight-forward digital synthesizers. With the addition of polyphonic digital sound sampling in the mid 1980s, the system became a monster in the world of sound production.
The integrated system featured "total recall" of each project, but the Synclavier was most remarkable because of its stunning sound libraries. These professionally recorded collections sold for over $10,000 and were light-years beyond anything available for other systems of the era (except maybe the Australian Fairlight CMI). In fact, many affordable sample-playback synthesizers from the late 1980s offered sound ROMs which featured sounds created on a Synclavier or Fairlight.
In addition to the control rack, the system featured a 76 key
weighted musical keyboard (based on the Sequential Circuits Prophet T8 mechanism) that was slathered with dozens of backlit
buttons. The sound cards themselves were eventually tweaked to capture
audio at the then unheard-of rate of 100 kHz (in comparison, most
modern $300 'pro' soundcards run at 192 kHz, although they don't use discrete $200 military-grade DACs). Part of the mystique
around the Synclavier system was its stunning complexity. Each system
comprised of dozens of circuit boards that were often upgraded several
times through the machine's life. The result is that there is no single
definitive version.
New England Digital eventually collapsed in 1992, unable to compete
against an onslaught of increasingly affordable and sophisticated
digital instruments and personal computers. Quite a few machines were
manufactured over the years and restored systems now sell for a
fraction of their original cost -- a 32 voice PSMT system like the one
shown above is available from Synhouse for just under $10,000. Now where
did I hide that lottery ticket I've been meaning to check?! [Sincere thanks to John Hill for letting us use a photo of one of his restored systems.]
