Soundscape S-2000 was

Ensoniq Ensoniq Corp. was an American electronics manufacturer, best known throughout the mid-1980s and 1990s for its musical instruments, principally Sampler (musical instrument), samplers and synthesizers. History In spring 1983, former MOS Technol ...

's first direct foray into the PC

sound card A sound card (also known as an audio card) is an internal expansion card that provides input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under the control of computer programs. The term ''sound card'' is also applied to external audio ...

market. The card arrived on the market in 1994. It is a full-length ISA digital audio and

sample-based synthesis Sample-based synthesis is a form of audio synthesis that can be contrasted to either subtractive synthesis or additive synthesis. The principal difference with sample-based synthesis is that the seed waveforms are sampled sounds or instrument ...

device, equipped with a 2

MiB The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

Ensoniq-built

ROM Rom, or ROM may refer to: Biomechanics and medicine * Risk of mortality, a medical classification to estimate the likelihood of death for a patient * Rupture of membranes, a term used during pregnancy to describe a rupture of the amniotic sac * ...

-based patch set. Some OEM versions of the card feature a smaller 1

patch set. It was praised for its then-high quality music synthesis and sound output, high compatibility and good software support.

Hardware overview

Ensoniq advertisements for the Soundscape stated "Finally, A Sound Card from a company that knows sound!", claiming that "the same wavetable technology that drives our $3,000 keyboards is available for your PC". The card uses an '

OTTO Otto is a masculine German given name and a surname. It originates as an Old High German short form (variants '' Audo'', '' Odo'', '' Udo'') of Germanic names beginning in ''aud-'', an element meaning "wealth, prosperity". The name is recorded fr ...

' synthesizer chip with a companion 'Sequoia' chip for MIDI duties, along with a

Motorola 68EC000 The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector ...

MHz The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), often described as being equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose formal expression in terms of SI base u ...

controller (a low-cost variant of the ubiquitous

68000 The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector ...

with selectable bus width) and a small amount of

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM most commonly refers to: * A male sheep * Random-access memory, computer memory * Ram Trucks, US, since 2009 ** List of vehicles named Dodge Ram, trucks and vans ** Ram Pickup, produced by Ram Trucks Ram, ram, or RAM may also ref ...

. Although it has RAM, the card does not support uploading of sound samples for the synthesizer. The on-board coprocessor was a much-advertised feature of the card, marketed to reduce the overhead of music synthesis through the device. Digital-to-analog audio conversion was handled by an

Analog Devices Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI), also known simply as Analog, is an American multinational corporation, multinational semiconductor company specializing in data conversion, signal processing, and power management technology, headquartered in Wilming ...

CODEC A codec is a computer hardware or software component that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder o ...

such as the AD1848, which was capable of sampling at up to 48 kHz."http://pdf1.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pdf/view/47932/AD/AD1848KP.html" The Soundscape S-2000's sample-based synthesizer lacked an effects processor, meaning digital effects such as

reverb In acoustics, reverberation (commonly shortened to reverb) is a persistence of sound after it is produced. It is often created when a sound is reflected on surfaces, causing multiple reflections that build up and then decay as the sound is a ...

and

chorus Chorus may refer to: Music * Chorus (song), the part of a song that is repeated several times, usually after each verse * Chorus effect, the perception of similar sounds from multiple sources as a single, richer sound * Chorus form, song in whic ...

were not supported. Advertisements also mentioned the card's three

CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains computer data storage, data computers can read, but not write or erase. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold b ...

interface connectors. As was common with multimedia cards produced in the mid-90s, a variety of

proprietary {{Short pages monitor Sound cards