Ensoniq

» see ensoniq.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

If you wrote out your machine in a forum signature around 2001, which everybody on the Turkish hardware boards did, the sound line was the one nobody argued about. Processor and graphics card were worth a fight. Sound was a line you filled in and moved past, and on a very large number of those machines the honest answer was a chip designed in Pennsylvania by the man who had built the audio hardware in the Commodore 64. Nobody wrote Ensoniq. The box said Sound Blaster.

Bob Yannes designed the MOS 6581, the SID, which is why a 1982 home computer had a synthesizer in it instead of a beeper. He left with Al Charpentier and others from the same chip team in 1982 and started a company in Malvern to build instruments rather than components. The first one that mattered was the Mirage in 1984. Sampling at that point meant a Fairlight or a Synclavier and a price somewhere north of thirty thousand dollars. The Mirage was 1,695 and it sold eight thousand units in a year, which is what people mean when they say a technology got democratized.

The instrument line kept going through the eighties and into the nineties with the ESQ-1 and then the ASR-10, a sampler-workstation that turned up on a lot of records because the sequencer and the effects lived in the same box as the sampler. Meanwhile the company had quietly built a second business. Soundscape put Ensoniq silicon on ISA cards, and then AudioPCI in 1997 did something more interesting: it moved most of the work into the host processor and drivers, which made the card cheap enough for the motherboard bill of materials at a time when Pentium II machines had processor cycles to spare.

That chip is what got the company bought. Creative Technology paid 77 million dollars in January 1998, took AudioPCI and sold it as Sound Blaster PCI 128 and AudioPCI 128, and folded the musical instrument division into E-mu, which it already owned. The combined E-mu/Ensoniq division shipped its last products around 2002 and was dissolved. The Malvern building went to a biotech company. The name is on nothing sold today.

~ the record ~

~ two companies in one ~

Ensoniq was really two businesses wearing one name, and they had almost nothing to do with each other. One built keyboards for musicians and competed with Roland and Korg on feel and sound. The other sold audio silicon by the wafer to Taiwanese motherboard makers and competed on cents. The keyboard business had the reputation. The chip business had the volume, and volume is what a buyer looks at.

Creative understood exactly which half it was buying. Its own Sound Blaster line was under attack from below by cheap PCI parts and from above by Aureal's positional audio, and AudioPCI closed the bottom. Within a year the budget end of the Sound Blaster catalog was Ensoniq design under a Creative label, which is why so many people owned one without ever seeing the word.

~ the long tail ~

The instruments outlived the company by a lot. ASR-10s and EPS samplers still get bought and repaired because a specific generation of hip-hop and house records was made on them, and a sampler with a distinctive converter chain has a sound that software does not casually reproduce. There is a small repair economy around the disk drives and the aging displays.

The chip side left nothing you can hold. Onboard AC'97 audio arrived, then HD Audio, and the discrete sound card became a thing only people with expensive headphones buy. It went the way any component goes once it is good enough to integrate: into the chipset, then into the noise floor of a specification sheet nobody reads. Two very different deaths for two halves of one company, and only one of them left objects behind.

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