Return of Ensoniq?

[Moonglow]

Yep, Jon still uses a TS-10 sitting on the Fazioli grand.

 

Uses it for his main synth sounds a la "Separate Ways", etc...

 

Last I heard he owns three of them. That was about four years ago.

 

From a Keyboard article on his current setup:

 

The crown jewel of Jonathan Cains touring keyboard rig is his 7'6" Fazioli grand piano that travels with the band in its own giant road case. That piano demands perfection, Cain tells me. I had to step up my game when I took that thing out. The Fazioli has all these colors. Behind some of these ballads I can play really softly. Its quite a rock n roll piano, but it also has a heart. The Fazioli has a MIDI 9 system installed, with which Jonathan triggers a Kurzweil MicroPiano and a Roland Fantom, for use when the house needs more piano volume.

 

Cains original synth sounds have been sampled and stored on a rack of E-mu Emulator E4X samplers. Separate Ways, for example, has Sequential Prophet-5 and Roland Jupiter sounds, so I have samples of the real instruments that I barely play anymore. They dont even work! The key contacts are so corroded it took me two days of pounding on the Jupiter just to get it to play. Cain triggers his samples from an Ensoniq TS-10 76- note controller that sits atop the Fazioli. He also pulls sounds from a Roland D-550 synth module.

 

Im looking at the soft synths pretty hard, Cain continues. I think my next time around Ill be running a Mac with Logic 8 as my synth bank, and relegating the synth sounds to things like the Arturia Prophet and Jupiter.

 

On his left-hand side, Cain also utilizes a Hammond XK-2 running through a real Leslie, with a Korg Triton on top of the clonewheel keyboard, for the industrial synth sounds, strings, and pads he says.

Hey thanks, EscapeRocks. He definitely must dig them! There's one on eBay at the moment going for $2,100 (Buy it Now). Never knew they were so valued/coveted.

[Joe Muscara]

I had a bunch of Transoniq Hacker mags too, but included them with the sale of my 16+ a couple of years ago. I included everything except disks of samples I made myself.

[richwhite9]

Hey thanks, EscapeRocks. He definitely must dig them! There's one on eBay at the moment going for $2,100 (Buy it Now). Never knew they were so valued/coveted.

 

They aren't that coveted (more like $750 to a $1000) but many like them in part because of the polyphonic-pressure (individual notes). It simply has some great sounds within its niche and layers are really dense and new controllers are well......

[VegasGT3]

I had a KS-32 too! Lasted me about eight years, before I sold it. I found that it broke down about a year later, so nine years of use - not bad.

 

[darth dad]

The Mirage was my first real keyboard. The piano sample was great at the time, although loading times were somewhat . . s l o w w w

[Daddyg3042]

I had the EPS-16+ and ESQ-1, but my favorite was the ASR-10 rack mount. It had some great sounds for it's time, plus alot of 3rd party sound development, and it also sampled. What wasn't fun was lugging around the Peavey C-8 that controlled it. That was a heavy beast.

 

I also have a pile of Transoniq Hackers mags on the bookshelf. Need to do something with them one of these days....

[Mr. Nightime]

 

Who knows, maybe my dislike of the product was somehow related to the fact that I was an Atari devotee, and Ensoniq was formed by ex-Commodore employees?

 

So THAT'S why my old ESQ-1 worked so nicely with my Commodore 64.

 

 

[Bosendorphen]

I too had the KS-32 and gigged it hard for years and composed a lot of music on it. No problems. It was a 50 pound tank indeed. Quite a number of nice sounds (I also got excellent 3rd party patches which I used for soundtracks at the time).

 

Our bassist has a TS-10 in his shed/rehearsal studio which doesn't have ongoing heat (a wood stove) in the winter or AC in summer (wall unit). So it's been exposed to quite a few extremes and still works flawlessly. Nice transwave patches on that.

[Meisenhower]

Back in the day, I had two ESQ-1's and two Mirages and neither set ever failed me (save for one drive on a Mirage that needed to be swapped out). These units were gigged hard, traveled by truck and plane in cases and always fired up.

 

Say what you will, but Ensoniq offered the first truly affordable sampling keyboard that finally put that technology into the hands of many!

 

The sample library for the Mirage was pretty robust and sample quality improved over time. Yes, load times were slow, but it was all disk based, so what do you expect.

 

The ESQ-1 offered a really nice mix of sounds and was versatile in its editing.

 

For the time, both keyboards offered exceptional "bang for the buck" in terms of sounds and functions.

 

Were they the Mercedes of the offerings, of course not! They were simply some of the best affordable tools available at the time.

 

They were also really nice people to deal with, as I remember getting a great tour of their facility in Malvern, PA.

[Synthoid]

They were also really nice people to deal with, as I remember getting a great tour of their facility in Malvern, PA.

 

Visited there as well, nice folks.

 

Too bad they were bought out by EMU, strangled by Creative.... and, oh never mind.

 

[JeffLearman]

I still use my MR76, which I got in 1997. I think the piano nearly competes with today's -- it's certainly way better than my NE2 (which I admit is also dated). Great "suitcase piano" Rhodes clone too -- it doesn't bark, but does have a great stereo vibrato that is NOT like the real thing but interesting in its own right.

 

I do agree that the buttons have issues. Mine stick sometimes. But, I've used the hell out of that keyboard and everything still works. I've also taken it to lots of blues jams where people like BluesKeys hammer the crap out of the keys, and yes, breaking some. Most I could fix, two I could not, and they now feel funky.

 

Other than the broken keys, I like the FATAR action as being the perfect compromise for a do-everything keyboard.

 

The FX chips in the Ensoniq's were ahead of their time, though probably not up to today's DSP standards. I always likeed the rotary speaker sim. It doesn't sound like a Leslie -- it's a very musical effect, though, nice for "organ-like" pads. Of course, the ROMpler organs are no substitute for any of the clonewheels. They're not even particularly good organ ROMpler setups, since the percussion is baked into the samples for most of them, rendering them useless.

 

[JeffLearman]

The UI is great, too, for the era. But Creative reviving Ensoniq wouldn't have any resemblance to the original company. They hold a bunch of outdated patents and chipsets, wheee. It was the people that made the company. All the people in the synth division are gone.

 

Now, if they came out with a statement that they were bringing back key people from the old company, that would be noteworthy.

 

As it is, it's just marketing hype. zzzzzzzzzz

 

[perturbo]

I still gig a few times/month with my 22 year old SQ-80. The only repair work I've ever had to perform on it was to replace the memory backup battery and re-seat a ribbon cable going from the keyboard to the keyboard controller board. SQ-80s and ESQ-1s are very robust instruments.

 

Even though it doesn't have any knobs, it has one of the quickest user interfaces for a digital synth around. There are no knobs or other realtime controls, but editing on-the-fly is a breeze. Plus, it has a full, thick sound, has a lot of bottom end and is great for bouncy, fat bass sounds and other analog synth type sounds. I think it's a great sounding keyboard in that it never sounds too clean and doesn't sound exactly the same on repeats of consecutive notes. It has a nice organic sound. The filter is nice, sometimes dark and maxing out the volume on the DCAs gives it a little bit of an overdriven sound.

 

I'm in an 80s cover band and I think that the 8-bit Ensoniq synths are ideal for that situation. It wasn't en vogue when the crystalline D-50 sound became popular, but it's fantastic for the early eighties poly synth sounds. Plus, it does oscillator sync and pseudo PWM, which is cool for a keyboard with waveforms in ROM.

 

My only complaint with the SQ-80 is the clackiness of the keys, although the action is very fast. Even with the noisy action, the polyphonic aftertouch is very cool.

[ProfD]

Another Ensoniq thread...cool.

 

They had the right idea with their products. I had a VFX-SD that was nice when it worked. I also owned a Mirage and EPS-M.

 

As a result of my VFX experience, I used the TS and ASR in the studio but never took the plunge in buying either one.

 

I'd imagine any Ensoniq offering today would have to be soft. Still, the competition is too thick IMO.

[Synthoid]

I sent an email to Creative asking about Ensoniq.

 

The response was:

 

 

Thank you for writing in to Creative.

 

With regards to your enquiry, I am sorry to inform you that we do not have any information when Ensoniq brand will be back in stock. However, we will forward the feedback to the development team.

 

[Les Mizzell]

> I sent an email to Creative asking about Ensoniq

 

Well, they didn't say "NO".

[Synthoid]

Yeah... it was a vague answer at best.

[ADino]

Heck, I still use an asr10..on my 3rd 1..still have an old SPM around here..now those r hard to find..besides the fact that noone is sactually looking for them...

[RABid]

I had a MR76. Loved the sound, sequencer, drum patterns, expansion ROMs, etc... Almost immediately I had problems with a switch changing the focus of the data entry dial. Went by the store and the floor model had the same problem. When the ZR76 came out I noticed that they floor model in the store had the same issue.

 

The shame is, when Emu and Ensoniq merged the resulting products did not sound as good as older Emu and Ensoniq gear.

[Steve Force]

I liked my TS-10 and my rack ASR-10. Sold them years ago (At a very good price)and actually rented the ASR-10 out a few times to various touring bands (names slip my mind at present.)

 

Would I want them back? No.

 

But when I had then they were cool.

[b3maniac]

When Ensoniq first released the Mirage I had two Mirage keyboards

and a couple of the racks, and a bit later an ESQ-1. I toted them

all over and never had a problem with any of them. As with all such things, they served to cover my needs at the time, all be it that the quality of the sounds are not up to those of today's workstations. But, at the time they were pretty good. Here's a link to a cover from 20 years ago using the Ensoniq for piano/stings/horns. Low-fi quality at best though.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000816181667&v=app_2392950137#!/video/video.php?v=161123013924904

Don

[peterkadar]

I had a MR76. Loved the sound, sequencer, drum patterns, expansion ROMs, etc... Almost immediately I had problems with a switch changing the focus of the data entry dial. Went by the store and the floor model had the same problem. When the ZR76 came out I noticed that they floor model in the store had the same issue.

 

The shame is, when Emu and Ensoniq merged the resulting products did not sound as good as older Emu and Ensoniq gear.

 

Agreed. And... I tried the Longboard out. I used to own an E5000 Ultra loaded to the max and a few Proteus 2000 series modules. The sounds are the same sounds that sounded dated ten years ago. And still no real time resonance in the filter. Whaaaat?!??

 

The last cool Ensoniq board that came out was the Fizmo... Sounded cool, but had some strange limitations and UI. Too bad. I liked their earlier products.

 

 

[JeffLearman]

The thing is, Emu and Ensoniq didn't "merge".

 

Ensoniq had 3 business lines: DSP chips, soundcards, and keyboard instruments. Creative bought them out as a competitive buyout on their soundcard product line, and I believe wanted some of their DSP technology as well.

 

Creative owned Emu, so it shoved the basically worthless keyboard instrument stuff at Emu, who did a half-hearted job of dressing some of it up as part of their product line.

 

Why basically worthless? Because it's damn hard to make any money in the keyboard instrument line, unless you're one of the big dogs. Despite a number of very marketable keyboards, Ensoniq probably never saw much of a profit from its keyboard product line. (I'm guessing there; happy to hear from anyone who knows the facts.)

[JeffLearman]

The MR's drum samples and layouts were great, but they goofed big time on the drum patterns. They should have had WAY more very simple, basic, almost "nothing" patterns to build on. Instead, they had a number of nice grooves, but they weren't generic enough to fit ideas in our heads. Either we conformed to their patterns, or we skipped the patterns completely.

 

It was great that they abandoned the GM keyboard layout for drum kits, so that we could have different strikes for the same instrument. This allowed drum parts that sounded far less mechanical.

 

These days, we can do a similar thing with a GM keymap and sets of samples for a given keyboard key, where the sample used is either round-robin or random. So, if I hit the snare drum key a bunch of times in a row, I don't hear the same sample repeated over and over.

[zephonic]

My SQ-2 was easily one of my worst purchases ever. But I loved the sound of the VFX, TS-12 and MR Rack. I just bought the one lemon they released.

 

 

 

[Delaware Dave]

i owned the VFX, SD1 and TS-12. IMO the best user interface of any keyboards I've ever owned. Loved the patch selects, the copy functionality, sample/program grouping, large LCD interface, polyphonic aftertouch, and super intuitive to use. If they could recreate the TS series with updated samples, increased polyphony and sliders that acted like drawbars, I'd buy one today. Unfortunately I don't believe that Creative has the capability of recreating an Ensoniq keyboard that would even come close to resembling the ideas and capabilities of the originals.

[Synthoid]

I don't believe that Creative has the capability of recreating an Ensoniq keyboard that would even come close to resembling the ideas and capabilities of the originals.

 

I agree. All that "news" about the return of Ensoniq seems to be BS, but none of us are surprised.

 

Of course... we still have the rest of 2011.

 

[Mark Schmieder]

All the original people are long gone... some of them went to Muse (or maybe those were E-Mu people; I forget).

 

Still, I suppose they have the silk screens...

 

I came close to trying out the Fuzio at one point, but got scared by all the instability reports. Wouldn't mind seeing them resurrect that using the latest technology.

 

Loved the MR-series. Too bad the one I bought on e-Bay was broken beyond repair (got a full refund). Those people knew musicians and their needs, and gave us the best world music sample set available until a few years ago when large scale world sample libraries started becoming available.

[NoLights]

I had an ESQ-1, Mirage and EPS -- all of them were supremely easy to use, and, for their time, provided amazing bang-for-buck-ness.

[RABid]

Maybe they are going to release a command station (XL-7/MP-7) for iPad.

 

Actually, I would probably buy it. I still have my loaded XL-7 and even though I hardly use it anymore I refuse to sell it for the current going rate on Ebay.