A university project, a shoebox computer and a company in Vermont.

The Synclavier began as a university project. At Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, the engineer Sydney Alonso and the student programmer Cameron Jones worked with the composer Jon Appleton, who taught electronic music there, on getting a computer to make musical sounds. English Wikipedia dates Appleton’s collaboration with the two engineers, and a prototype called the Dartmouth Digital Synthesizer, to 1973; a record of that name came out on Folkways in 1976.

The company came next. “In 1976, my business partner Sydney Alonso and I formed a corporation—New England Digital Corporation—in Norwich, Vermont,” Jones told the retailer Musician’s Friend in a 2019 interview, placing it in March 1976. Jones was the software engineer; Alonso, a former MIT student working as a research associate at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering, built the hardware. Their first product was not an instrument but ABLE, a 16-bit computer Jones described as “about the size of a shoe box,” sold for scientific data collection. Appleton, English Wikipedia says, spent a year as a partner in the firm after a spell running Sweden’s national electronic-music studio, then returned to teaching at Dartmouth.

The TEC Awards’ Hall of Fame entry, written by George Petersen in 2004, adds a detour: in 1976 the young company won a contract from Norlin, which had just bought Moog Music, to build marketing prototypes, and when Norlin dropped the funding early in 1977, New England Digital got its technology back. Petersen also names a third Dartmouth student, Judd Burnham, among the original group. The company later moved to White River Junction, Vermont, according to English Wikipedia.

Red buttons, one knob and a tapeless studio.

The first Synclavier appeared in 1978. Jones said he showed it at the Audio Engineering Society convention in Los Angeles in May 1978 and that the company sold thirteen, mostly to colleges and universities; Sound On Sound’s Gordon Reid put the number built at about twenty. At first it had no keyboard or control panel, Reid wrote in 2023: it was a two-operator FM synthesizer programmed from a computer terminal. The TEC Hall of Fame called it “the first commercially available, real-time digital synthesis instrument.” The last Synclavier I, Jones recalled, went to the British producer Mike Thorne.

The Synclavier II, launched in May 1980, made the name. The arranger Denny Jaeger shaped how it should work, Jones said, while Jones wrote most of the software and designed the button panel; Brad Naples, hired as business manager, went on to lead the company. It layered four voices of FM and additive synthesis and came with the 61-note ORK keyboard. A 76-note velocity- and pressure-sensitive keyboard, the VPK, followed, built on the keybed of Sequential’s Prophet-T8. Sampling arrived in 1982, then direct-to-disk recording, MIDI, notation and even a guitar interface, Reid wrote — the system that came to be sold as the “Tapeless Studio.”

It was heard on records that defined the decade. Jones said the clang that opens Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” is a Synclavier factory sound. Synthtopia, reporting Arturia’s software version in 2016, listed Sting’s The Dream of the Blue Turtles and Frank Zappa’s Jazz from Hell, which it said Zappa recorded with the Synclavier alone. Reid recalled Tony Banks of Genesis playing an ORK keyboard on the Invisible Touch tours. In 2004 the instrument entered the TECnology Hall of Fame.

It was never cheap. Reid gave base prices of $57,000 for a sample-based Synclavier 3200 and $148,000 for a Synclavier 9600, before options such as RAM cards and optical drives that cost tens of thousands of dollars more.

Design and documentation.

Digital sampling and synthesis reached recording studios in the late 1970s and 1980s. Fairlight, founded in Sydney in 1975 by Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, introduced its CMI in 1979; New England Digital, founded in Vermont in 1976 by Sydney Alonso and Cameron Jones, built the Synclavier; and Wolfgang Palm’s PPG, in Hamburg, introduced wavetable synthesis in 1979, English Wikipedia says.

American makers brought prices down. E-mu, whose name Dave Rossum coined in 1971 and which he and Scott Wedge formed as a partnership in 1972, moved from modular synthesizers to samplers; Ensoniq, of Malvern, Pennsylvania, launched its Mirage sampler in 1985 at $1,695; Kurzweil, founded in 1982, launched its K250 in 1984; and Alesis, formed in Hollywood by Keith Barr in 1984, Mix reported, launched the ADAT recorder in 1991.

Few stayed independent. PPG closed in 1987, and New England Digital in the early 1990s. Creative Technology of Singapore bought E-mu in 1993 and Ensoniq in 1998, and merged them. The Korean piano maker Young Chang bought Kurzweil in 1990; Hyundai Development Company bought Young Chang in 2006, and the group, renamed HDC Young Chang in 2018, is based in Incheon; Kurzweil’s own website names no parent company today.

Some names returned. Blackmagic Design, the Australian video company, bought Fairlight in 2016 and sells Fairlight consoles. Cameron Jones bought back the Synclavier trademark, and his Synclavier Digital released the Regen synthesizer in 2022. Jack O’Donnell bought Alesis in 2001; it belongs to his inMusic group of Cumberland, Rhode Island.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A bank, a buy-back and a desktop revival.

New England Digital did not survive the early 1990s. As cheaper polysynths and samplers arrived, it went into decline; the TEC Hall of Fame and English Wikipedia’s company article date its closure to 1992, while Jones gave 1993, so sources differ. Reid wrote that it went bankrupt and was liquidated. Fostex and the Canadian firm AirWorks bought parts of the business, English Wikipedia says, and owners kept their systems running through user groups and service firms such as Steve Hills’s Synclavier European Services in London. Jones told Musician’s Friend that the intellectual property “was bought up by a bank—then it was owned by a Canadian company called Airworks,” and that he bought it and the trademark back from a second bank, getting the trade name and software back in 1998.

Since then Jones has kept the name alive in software and small hardware. Arturia’s Synclavier V, made with Jones and launched in its V Collection 5 in 2016, uses part of the original code, Arturia said. Synclavier Go! for iPad followed in 2019, and Regen, a desktop synthesizer developed with the hardware designer Craig Phillips, came out in autumn 2022, the company says; Reid reviewed it in October 2023, when it cost £2,599. The website is run by Synclavier Music, LLC, which says the Synclavier name is a registered trademark of Cameron Warner Jones used by permission. We found no statement on its website about where the Regen is built.

The look is documented largely in the company’s own words: “iconic red buttons” that could be swiped several at a time, a “2″ spring-balanced aluminium control knob” and, on the VPK, what Reid called “a huge black slab.” English Wikipedia groups the later, Macintosh-controlled models as “ivory panel” systems.

For a design guide, Synclavier shows how a control surface can become the brand: a field of red buttons and one silver knob. Compare Fairlight, its great rival in the early 1980s, and Arturia, which brought it back as software. For this guide we use black, a button red, ivory and aluminium with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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