Ensoniq

History

In spring 1983, former MOS Technology engineers Robert "Bob" Yannes, Bruce Crockett, Charles Winterble, David Ziembicki, and Albert Charpentier formed Peripheral Visions. The team had designed the Commodore 64 but had left MOS/Commodore as a result of disagreements with company CEO Jack Tramiel, over a new design of home computer for Commodore which they proposed, but Tramiel rejected. To raise funds in order to build the machine themselves under their new venture, 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. Their expertise at Commodore however had also led to the design of a new sound chip - the Digital Oscillator Chip (DOC) which had reached a more advanced state of development as the doomed keyboard project for Atari.

Renaming itself as Ensoniq, the new company instead designed a music synthesizer based on the DOC chip.. This product emerged as the Mirage sampling keyboard in late 1984. Samplers had purely been the preserve of professional studios and established pop stars, but at the bargain price of $1695 the Mirage brought the technology within the reach of the amateur musician, and was a runaway success - selling 8,000 units in its first year of production.

Ensoniq grew rapidly over the next few years with the success of the Mirage and the ESQ-1. The plant in Great Valley, Pennsylvania employed nearly 200 people and housed the manufacturing facility. A number of successful products followed which all included the full-custom ICs for music and effects which were developed in house. While the core keyboard products were generally successful, there were some quality problems and fierce competition from the Japanese "big three" (Roland, Korg and Yamaha) who were able to undercut on price, offer better reliability and match technical specification, eventually drove Ensoniq out of the musical instrument business - a similar fate that had befallen earlier American electronic music pioneers in the 1980s - such as Moog, Oberheim, Sequential and Linn Electronics.

An attempt to diversify into hearing aids was unsuccessful and put the company in financial peril. In the mid-nineties, they developed a line of very cost-effective sound cards which sold millions of units.

In January 1998, ENSONIQ Corp. was acquired by Creative Technology Ltd. for $77 million. The acquisition was focused on the sound-card technology of the Ensoniq Audio-PCI. The musical products division, which was in financial trouble, was merged with E-mu Systems to form the E-Mu/Ensoniq division of Creative. Over the next three years the Ensoniq operation in Pennsylvania was gradually dismantled and shut down (the factory building is now occupied by Janssen Biotech). 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.

Timeline of major products

1984 – Ensoniq Pro-Cussion

1984 – Ensoniq Mirage

1986 – Ensoniq ESQ-1