E-mu Audity

Only one Audity ever came off the assembly line. It is a state of the art computer based analog synthesizer commissioned by ex-Tangerine Dreamer Peter Baumann in 1979. It came at a time when E-mu, like other synth manufacturers of the time, were making a move towards producing an instrument that was more compact and more advanced than the purely analog modular beasts they had been making. Under pressure from synths like Sequential's Prophet-5, E-mu set out to make a very powerful analog synth. The Audity was a 16-voice instrument with a massive amount of programmability and stability thanks to the computer based technology that controlled it.
Unfortunately the instrument was so expensive ($70,000) that nobody wanted to buy one. It was also a bear to program. E-mu wound up shelving it in order to start over with a new concept inspired by the Fairlight. This led to a sophisticated and much cheaper sampler - the Emulator 1. But the Audity had not been forgotten by E-mu. Much of the Audity's multi-timbral design went into the creation of the sample-playback Proteus synthesizers, which in turn paved way for the Audity 2000 sound module!
The one and only living Audity is currently in a synthesizer gallery at the CANTOS Music Foundation in Calgary, Alberta Canada. It was never actually completed, so it has never actually worked. As such, it remains a truly one-of-a-kind show-piece of what could have been - the synthesizer equivalent of a concept-car.
- Specifications
- Polyphony - 16 voices
- Oscillators - 2 SSM Chips with multi-waveforms, Noise Source per voice
- LFO - Yes
- Filter - SSM Filter Chips: High-Pass Filter, Low-Pass Filter. Separate resonant Filter also available.
- Envelopes - Envelopes gens for VCOss, VCFss, and VCA's
- Memory - Multi Patch Storage
- Keyboard - 61 keys
- Date Produced - 1979/80
- Websites of Interest
- Resources & Credits
Images from Flickr.
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If I have some time, I will put a demonstration on Youtube, so everybody can hera that sound.
I imagine that it sounds like a more stable first-gen Prophet 5 if it uses SSM chips.
*wanna touch it* :P