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 at David Kean's Audities Foundation museum.
I imagine that it sounds like a more stable first-gen Prophet 5 if it uses SSM chips.
*wanna touch it* :P