The new science came into its own with the introduction of the quietly revolutionary Akai S1000 in 1988. Like the Minimoog two decades earlier, it took a set of innovations, made them available to a broader market, and radically changed the way average musicians thought about creating music. The Mirage was important in that it made sampling a real possibility for struggling musicians.
By today’s standards, the recording quality was laughable, but in those days, that was characteristic even of astronomically priced professional machines like the Fairlight. Sampling, which involves the digital recording of short segments of audio into computer memory for instrument-like processing and playback, had been around in one form or another since the late 1970s, but affordable samplers didn’t appear until the mid-eighties, with the introduction of Ensoniq’s Mirage sampling keyboard. While analog tape machines record sound by magnetizing particles on a strip of plastic, digital recorders encode audio as a string of ones and zeros on a hard disk or in RAM.
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