New England Digital

~ the goodbye ~

A company in rural Vermont built one of the most expensive musical instruments ever sold and found a few hundred customers for it, most of whom you have heard without knowing it. New England Digital started in 1976 in Norwich, out of work done at Dartmouth, with Sydney Alonso on the hardware and Cameron Jones on the software and the composer Jon Appleton pushing for something a musician could actually operate.

The Synclavier began as a digital synthesizer with a keyboard bolted to a minicomputer of the company's own design. What made it historically important came later, when the company added the ability to record real sound into memory and then, in the early eighties, straight onto a hard disk. Sampling to disk removed the memory limit that made every other sampler a machine for short noises, and it put a real editing screen in front of the person doing it. Composing with recorded sound and hearing it back without ever touching tape: that workflow starts here.

The price started high and went up. A serious rig ran past two hundred thousand dollars, which meant the customer list was studios rather than musicians. Michael Jackson had one and Frank Zappa built entire records on his. Sting and Laurie Anderson worked on them too, and by the middle of the decade the machine was quietly responsible for a large share of the sounds coming out of American film and television.

I have never been in a room with one and neither has anyone I know. What reached me was the output, on records and on television, made with a device I had no idea existed. The rest of the inheritance is even less visible: sampling a sound and cutting it up on a screen is free software on a phone now, and the fact that this was once a two hundred thousand dollar capability built in Vermont is the sort of thing you only find out by looking backwards.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the machine ~

Underneath the keyboard was a proprietary 16-bit computer called the ABLE, which the company designed because in 1977 nothing off the shelf could do the job. That decision defined everything afterwards. It meant New England Digital controlled the whole stack and could add capabilities nobody else could match, and it also meant every part of the product had to be built and supported by a company of a few dozen people in Vermont.

The Direct-to-Disk system that grew out of it was a multitrack recorder with no tape in it at all, at a time when the industry ran on two inch reels and razor blades. Studios that bought one were buying the future of their trade about eight years early, at a price that only made sense if the room was booked constantly. Which, for a while, it was.

~ the price ~

The problem with selling a two hundred thousand dollar instrument is that your market is a fixed number of rooms and you eventually finish selling to all of them. Meanwhile the cost of doing something approximate kept falling. The Akai S900 in 1986 and the Ensoniq machines before it put usable sampling into ordinary studios for a few thousand dollars, and Digidesign put audio editing on a Macintosh screen for less than that.

None of them matched a Synclavier. They did not have to. Once the difference between the instrument and the cheap alternative was smaller than the difference in price, the argument was over, and it was over quickly. The company answered by adding features to a system that was already the most capable thing available, which raised the price again.

~ the collapse ~

The financing came apart in 1992 and the company folded, with the wind-down running into 1993. Assets went out in pieces, some to Fostex, which used the hard disk recording engineering in its own products later in the decade. There was no dramatic final act, no lawsuit, no rival buying the corpse to shut it down. A small manufacturer in a shrinking high-end market ran out of money in a recession.

Cameron Jones bought the intellectual property rather than let it evaporate, and set up a small operation to keep existing systems running. That is why Synclaviers are still working today in a handful of studios, thirty years after the company that built them stopped existing, kept alive by one of the two people who wrote the software in the first place.

~ what remains ~

Every capability the Synclavier charged six figures for is now a checkbox in software that costs nothing. Record a sound, look at it, cut it, tune it, put it on a timeline next to forty other things. The company that proved a musician would want all of that in one place could not survive being right about it, because being right about it is exactly what made the machine unnecessary.

The other thing it left is a specific texture. Records made on a Synclavier sound like a Synclavier, and a generation of listeners learned what expensive digital sound was from a machine assembled by a few dozen people in a small town in Vermont, without ever hearing the name of the company that made it.

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