Ensoniq · 1986 · 1980s · 32 voices
The Apple IIGS shipped with the same wavetable chip that powered Ensoniq's professional synthesisers — designed by Bob Yannes, the engineer behind the Commodore 64's SID. It made the IIGS the best-sounding home computer of 1986, and got Apple sued by the Beatles.
The Ensoniq 5503 Digital Oscillator Chip, or DOC, is a professional instrument chip that ended up in a home computer. It was designed by Bob Yannes, the engineer who had created the SID chip for the Commodore 64 before co-founding Ensoniq, and it was the same part Ensoniq used in its Mirage sampler and ESQ-1 synthesiser. Apple put it on the motherboard of the Apple IIGS, released in September 1986. Unlike the FM and square-wave chips of its competitors, the DOC plays back sampled waveforms from memory. It has 32 oscillators and its own 64 KB of dedicated RAM, separate from system memory, where instruments are stored as wavetables. Apple's firmware pairs the oscillators to produce fuller voices, and one pair is always reserved as a timing clock — which is why the IIGS is commonly described as having fifteen voices rather than sixteen or thirty-two. For games and music software this meant real sampled instruments at a time when most home computers were still generating tones. It also had a legal cost. Apple Computer had an existing agreement with Apple Corps, the Beatles' company, not to enter the music business, and Apple Corps considered a professional-grade synthesiser chip on the motherboard a violation of it, adding the IIGS to a trademark dispute that would run for decades.