Ensoniq


Ensoniq Corp. was an American electronics manufacturer, best known throughout the mid-1980s and 1990s for its musical instruments, principally samplers and synthesizers.

Company history

In spring 1983, former MOS Technology engineers Robert "Bob" Yannes, Bruce Crockett, Charles Winterble, David Ziembicki, and Al Charpentier formed Peripheral Visions. The team had designed the Commodore 64, and hoped to build another computer. To raise funds, Peripheral Visions agreed to build a computer keyboard for the Atari 2600, but the video game crash of 1983 canceled the project and Commodore sued the new company, claiming that it owned the keyboard project. Renaming itself as Ensoniq, the new company instead designed a music synthesizer.
In January 1998, ENSONIQ Corp. was acquired by Creative Technology Ltd. for $77 million, and merged with E-mu Systems to form the E-Mu/Ensoniq division. Ensoniq products at that time were based on the ESP2 chip. At the time of the EMU/Ensoniq merger, the ESP2 chip was no longer manufacturable and had to be backwards engineered by E-mu which took a long time and sealed Ensoniq's fate. After releasing an entry-level E-mu MK6/PK6 and Ensoniq Halo keyboards in 2002 – essentially keyboard versions of the Proteus 2500 module – the E-Mu/Ensoniq division was dissolved and support for legacy products was discontinued soon afterward.

Musical instruments and digital systems





Ensoniq entered the instrument market with the Mirage sampling keyboard in 1985. At the price of USD$1695 it cost significantly less than previous samplers such as the Fairlight CMI and the E-MU Emulator. Starting with the ESQ-1, they began producing sample-based synthesizers. Following the success of these products, Ensoniq established a subsidiary in Japan in 1987.
Ensoniq products were highly professional. Strong selling points were ease-of-use and their characteristic "fat", rich sound. After the Mirage, all Ensoniq instruments featured integrated sequencers providing an all-in-one "digital studio production concept" instrument. These were often called "Music Workstations". Starting with the VFX synthesizer, high-quality effects units were included, in addition most synthesizer and all sampler models featured disk drives and/or RAM cards for storage. The manuals and tutorial documents were clearly written and highly musician-oriented, allowing the users to quickly get satisfactory results from their machines. In 1988, the company enlisted the Dixie Dregs in a limited edition promotional CD Off the Record which featured the band using the EPS sampler and SQ-80 cross wave synthesizer.
The company had much success with the SQ product line starting in the early 1990s. This was a lower-cost line that included the SQ-1, SQ-2 and SQ-R. Later versions were produced with 32 sound-generating voices.




The company's heyday was in the early 1990s when the VFX synthesizers offered innovative performance and sequencing features, along with the ASR series of 16-bit samplers which also integrated synthesis, effects, and sequencer into a single-unit digital studio. The TS synthesizers followed the legacy of the VFX line, improving several aspects such as the polyphony, effects engine, sample-loading capabilities and even better synth and acoustic sounds. The DP series of effects rack-mount units offered parallel processing and reverb presets on a par with Lexicon's offerings, but at affordable prices.


Despite these strengths, early Ensoniq instruments suffered from reliability and quality problems such as bad keyboards, under-developed power-supply units, or mechanical issues. Through the early and mid-1990s, much effort was focused on improving the reliability of the products. The company didn't manage to reinvent its workstation concept in order to survive the mid and late '90s, and no lower-budget versions of their keyboards were offered to replace the aging SQ line. Excellent synthesizers like the VFX or TS models lacked cheaper rack-mount counterparts. Finally, while the competition's products were continually evolving and newer technologies such as physical modeling were introduced, Ensoniq failed to follow the late '90s market orientation, often recycling old concepts on their new products. During this time, much of the engineering effort and company resources were focused on computer sound cards, which offered more profit for the company.

Timeline of major products















In 1986, after making an agreement with Apple Computer, the same ES5503 DOC utilized in the Mirage sampler, ESQ-1, ESQm and SQ80 synthesizers, and SDP1 piano module was incorporated into the Apple IIGS personal computer.
Later engines, with 16-bit sample playback and internal digital filters, were ES5504 DOC-II and ES5505 OTIS. Finally, ES5506 OTTO drove all subsequent 32-voice machines and the dual-OTTO machines. The latest incarnation, ES5548 OTTO-48, was used in the final line of Ensoniq studio products.
Ensoniq also developed an effects DSP, ES5510 ESP, that was used in the machines from VFX on and the standalone FX units DP/2 and DP/4. OTTO-48 generation uses its greatly enhanced successor, ES5511 ESP V2. A combination of OTTO and ESP, ES5540 OTTOFX, was also developed and sold.
The Ensoniq ES5505 OTIS/OTISR2, and ES5510 ESP were also used in various arcade games. They were all manufactured on the CMOS process. OTTO was licensed to Advanced Gravis for use in the Gravis Ultrasound card. In 1994, production began on PC sound cards for home computers. The design of the video-game console Atari Panther also included the OTIS chip, though the product never reached series production. A dedicated version of OTTO, ES5530/35 OPUS, was developed for AT-bus sound cards, featuring built-in joystick and CD-ROM interface.
Ensoniq's sound cards were popular and shipped with many IBM PC compatibles. Almost every newer MS-DOS-era game supported the Ensoniq Soundscape either directly or through General MIDI. In addition, Ensoniq devised an ISA software audio emulation solution for their new PCI sound cards that was compatible with most IBM PC games. It is speculated that this was an important factor in Creative Lab's acquisition of Ensoniq, because Creative/E-MU was struggling with legacy compatibility at the time with their higher-performance PCI audio solutions. According to one source, because of the wide range of patents Ensoniq had involving PCI-bus support for the sound cards, and the fact that Ensoniq wanted E-MU's technologies, the buyout of Ensoniq became the best of both worlds.

Soundscape