The original design and development of the Synclavier prototype occurred at
Dartmouth College with the collaboration of
Jon Appleton, Professor of Digital Electronics, Sydney A. Alonso, and Cameron Jones, a software programmer and student at Dartmouth's
Thayer School of Engineering.
Synclavier I First released in 1977–78, it proved to be highly influential among both
electronic music composers and
music producers, including
Mike Thorne, an early adopter from the commercial world, due to its versatility, its cutting-edge technology, and distinctive sounds. The Synclavier architecture was based on
additive synthesis, with the output of multiple digital sine wave oscillators blended to form complex timbres. The oscillators formed the fundamental frequency along with
harmonics or partials. The loudness and
envelope of each oscillator could be adjusted using front panel controls.
New England Digital Corporation (NED) designed their own 16-bit central processor called Able, a kind of
minicomputer. Such an advanced computer was required because digital additive synthesis is computationally expensive. The audible result of additive synthesis was somewhat thin, suitable for steady-state sounds such as vibrating strings: violin, harp, guitar, etc. It was not good at generating percussive sounds with fast transients. Only about 20 Synclavier I models were built. These were sold mostly to universities. The initial models had only a computer and synthesis modules; later models added a musical keyboard and control panel.
Synclavier II The system evolved in its next generation of product, the Synclavier II, which was released in early 1980 with the strong influence of music producer Denny Jaeger of
Oakland, California. It was originally Jaeger's suggestion that the FM synthesis concept be extended to allow four simultaneous channels or voices of synthesis to be triggered with one key depression to allow the final synthesized sound to have much more harmonic series activity. This change greatly improved the overall sound design of the system and was very noticeable. 16-bit user sampling (originally in mono only) was added as an option in 1982. This model was succeeded by the ABLE Model C computer-based PSMT in 1984 and then the Mac-based 3200, 6400 and 9600 models, all of which used the VPK keyboard.
Keyboard controller Synclavier II models used an on/off type keyboard (retroactively called the ORK) while later models, labeled simply
Synclavier, used a weighted velocity- and pressure-sensitive keyboard (called the VPK) that was licensed from
Sequential Circuits and used in their Prophet-T8 synthesizer.
Digital sampling The company evolved the system continuously through the early 1980s to integrate the first 16-bit
digital sampling system to magnetic disk, and eventually a 16-bit polyphonic sampling system to memory, as well. The company's product was the only digital sampling system that allowed sample rates to go as high as 100 kHz.
Tapeless studio concept Ultimately, the system was referred to as the
Synclavier Digital Recording Tapeless Studio system among many professionals. It was a pioneering system in revolutionizing movie and television sound effects and
Foley effects methods of design and production starting at
Glen Glenn Sound. Although pricing made it inaccessible for most musicians (a Synclavier could cost anywhere from $25,000 to $200,000), it found widespread use among producers and professional
recording studios, competing at times in this market with high-end production systems such as the
Fairlight CMI.
Technological achievements When the company launched and evolved its technology, there were no
off-the-shelf computing systems, integrated software, or
sound cards. Consequently, all of the hardware from the company's main
real-time CPU, all input and output cards,
analog-to-digital and
digital-to-analog cards and its memory cards were developed internally, as well as all of the software. The hardware and software of the company's real-time capability were used in other fields completely remote to music, such as the main Dartmouth College campus computing node computers for one of the USA's first
campus-wide computing networks, and in
medical data acquisition research projects.
End of manufacture New England Digital ceased operations in 1993. According to Jones, "The intellectual property was bought up by a bank—then it was owned by a Canadian company called Airworks—and I bought the intellectual property and the trademark back from a second bank, which had foreclosed on it from Airworks."
Reincarnations In 2019, Jones released an
iOS version of the Synclavier dubbed Synclavier Go! using much of the original code base. Jones has also worked with
Arturia to bring the Synclavier V software version of the instrument to the Arturia V Collection plugin suite. In 2022, Synclavier Digital released and started production on the Regen, a desktop FM synthesizer. == Models and options ==