Ensoniq Mirage

The Ensoniq Mirage was the first affordable for the masses sampler.

In 1985, the company Ensoniq in front of the Mirage. Up to this time, sampling was an expensive pleasure, what changed with the Mirage. With a price of less than U.S. $ 1700 it was affordable for the masses and offered editing options that were a few years earlier reserved for the expensive Fairlight CMI.

The Mirage offered in the basic version sampling in an 8 -bit resolution with up to 33 kHz. For the rack and keyboard first version there was an optional input filter module, enabled the sampling with 50 - kHz rate. Due to the extensive library and the difficulty of processing power the Mirage was mainly used as a sample player. The other sound editing was done but in classic subtractive manner by analogue VCF. The envelope and LFO were entirely digitally generated, a VCA is not used at the Mirage. By multi-sampling could assign different samples different regions of the 61-key velocity-sensitive keyboard comprehensive, which also simultaneously, so multi-timbral, could be played via MIDI.

About the 3.5 " floppy drive you booted the operating system and stored data, each data disk also contained a copy of the operating system. Externally synchronizable The internal sequencer rounded off the former image of a cheap and fairly complete music production system.

Head the development of the Mirage was Bob Yannes, who also designed the legendary SID chip (sound interface device ) of the Commodore 64. As a Motorola CPU usage was 6809.

1988 followed the Mirage of EPS ( Ensoniq Performance Sampler ), which allowed a resolution of 12 bits at up to 52 kHz with a memory of 480 kB initially.

  • Keyboard
  • Sampler
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