Audity: Description

The Analog Fairlight The Audity was a ground breaking synthesizer at the very edge of new technology. It came with a system CPU with dual 8" disk drives, a large blue case for the voice cards, the 5 octave "programmable console", the keyboard and sequencer with its own optional 8" floppy disk drive and the system software. You certainly got some hardware for your money! The Audity model number was 5020.

Total Digital Control The Audity could be purchased with up to 16 computer controlled voice cards (more on special order - the Audity cabinet could manage a maximum of 64). Unlike other programmable synthesizers of this time period the Audity had independent computer control of each card, allowing 16 different sounds to be created simultaneously. "Single Voice Sounds" are created using the front panel controls and can be saved into memory. "System Presets" can then be created to hold up to 16 different single voice sounds. 12 of these System Presets can be accessed directly from the front panel. E-mu Systems called them "orchestrations", and they can be changed in real time by the sequencer ! This level of voice control was far superior to the Sequential Prophet 5's single preset at a time, or even the dual mode of the Roland Jupiter 8 of 1981.

Disk Storage The Audity has three 8" floppy disk drives. The first is used to read the system software, the second stores Single Voice Sounds and System Presets, the third is used for sequencer storage.   »

Alphanumeric Display The Audity has a 40 character, cool blue colored, alpha numeric display on the top left of the programmable console. There is also a numeric keypad and a variety of buttons and LED's for controlling the 16 channels of the Audity.

The Audity Voice Each voice consists of two multi-waveform VCO's with simultaneous triangle, square and sawtooth waveforms, pulse width modulation and hard sync;  a variable spectrum noise source (white, pink and mauve), three filters - voltage controlled 24dB/octave low and high pass, plus a multimode resonant filter after the VCA; a VCA with linear and exponential response; four ADSR envelopes with initial delay which were assigned to the two VCF's, VCA and VCO; an LFO with reset and four waveforms (square, triangle, postive and negative ramp), and two signal mixers.

There are four independent modulation busses for patching the modules together. One bus has delay available to it.

16-channel Digital Keyboard and Sequencer The Audity keyboard controller is a standard Model 4060 polyphonic keyboard with an optional 4070 Floppy Disc SubSystem.

The keyboard controller provides programmable control of keyboard split, channel assignment and transposition. It has a built in 16-channel digital memory sequencer which allows multi-channel composition up to 6000 notes in real time. These sequences can be stored to the included 8" floppy disk drive. Six sequences can be saved on each floppy disk. more »

There is reference to both the Audity and 4070 in the Computer Music Journal Volume 4 No. 4 - Winter 1980.