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Synclavier

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Synclavier I

The Synclavier System was an early synthesizer and sampler, manufactured by New England Digital. First released in the late 1970's, it proved to be highly influential among both music producers and electronic musicians, due to its versatility, its cutting-edge technology and distinctive sound.

Originally developed as the "Dartmouth Digital Synthesizer" by Dartmouth College professor Jon Appleton, in association with NED founders Cameron W. Jones and Sydney A. Alonso, - and subsequently under the marketing guidance of Brad Naples[1] the Synclavier was one of the first synthesizers to completely integrate digital technology. It used FM synthesis as well as sampling in order to create sounds, which were stored on large magnetic disks. It was often referred to, by New England Digital and others, as the "tapeless studio," due to one's ability to compose and produce an entire song, solely on the Synclavier. Synclavier systems were expensive - the highest price ever paid for one was about $500,000, although average systems were closer to about $200,000 - $300,000. Although this made it inaccessible for most musicians, it found widespread use among producers and professional recording studios, and it competed in this market with other high-end production systems, such as the Fairlight CMI.

For the price, users got a system with custom parts, built by hand, all to the highest specifications available. Users enjoyed most of the abilities of modern PC "virtual" sound studios - recording, sequencing, playback, and disk storage. All were integrated seamlessly with the hardware, with a high degree of parallelism built into the electronics (for example, two digital to analog converters for each stereo channel of sampled sound, with analog volume control) to avoid the issues of digital mixing artifacts, latency, and heavy CPU usage that are concerns of modern PC-based studios. In these respects, the Synclavier system still surpasses modern methods.[citation needed]

Several generations of the Synclavier were produced. The earliest, called simply the "Synclavier" and later called "Synclavier I" and shown in the photo, came out in 1977-78 and was a primarily academic music and research system. It was bought by several universities, and got the attention of a number of leading electronic musicians. Some of the research configurations were simply the electronics, without a keyboard, and were controlled by writing custom software.

Bottom of Synclavier rack

In 1980, the "Synclavier II" was introduced, which was far more commercially packaged. The basic configuration had an on-off keyboard (known as the Original Keyboard), and 8 to 32 voices of FM sound generation. Over the next six years, Synclavier II became the most commonly sold configuration, and a number of options were introduced.

The Sample-to-Disk option offered in 1982 was the first 16-bit digital audio hard drive recording device on the market. It was capable of monophonic recordings with a sampling rate of up to 50 kHz. Greater throughput was not possible due to the limitations of hard drives at the time.[2][3]

Display of Velocity Pressure Keyboard (VPK)

The velocity-sensitive and pressure-sensitive keyboard option came out soon afterwards, and many users upgraded to it. To indicate that this was an option compatible with the Synclavier II, and not the introduction of a Synclavier III, the V-P keyboard was simply labeled "Synclavier".

By the mid-1980s, the Polyphonic Sampling option added to the sound capabilities. Like the FM boards, this option was available in different numbers of voices, and different amounts of memory.

In the late 1980s, the company introduced configurations of the basic electronics, the V-P keyboard, the polyphonic sampling voices, and large disk storage to create different systems that were focused on movie production, on sound effects, on studio recording, and on live performance. These realized the concept of the tapeless studio, and were marketed as the Synclavier 3200, 6400, and 9600 models.

New England Digital went out of business in 1991, and the Synclavier is no longer manufactured. It is, however, still in use in the recording industry, particularly among soundtrack composers and sound designers.

Notable Synclavier users

References

  1. ^ http://www.bradnaples.com
  2. ^ Synclavier history
  3. ^ Synclavier Manual 3
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