> Maybe it was a fluke, maybe nostalgia, maybe people at Commodore had a good ear when tweaking the circuit and made something sound good out of the little budg

> Maybe it was a fluke, maybe nostalgia, maybe people at Commodore had a good ear when tweaking the circuit and made something sound good out of the little budget they had because they knew they couldn't go for hi-fi (that would actually be clever). In the words of the engineer that designed the SID chip, Bob Yannes who founded the synthesizer company Ensoniq after he left Commodore in 1982: > “Actually, I was an electronic music hobbyist before I started working for MOS Technology (one of Commodore's chip divisions at the time) and before I knew anything at all about VLSI chip design. One of the reasons I was hired was my knowledge of music synthesis was deemed valuable for future MOS/Commodore products. When I designed the SID chip, I was attempting to create a single-chip synthesizer voice which hopefully would find it's way into polyphonic/polytimbral synthesizers.” > “The SID chip was my first attempt at a phase-accumulating oscillator, which is the heart of all wavetable synthesis systems. Due to time constraints, the oscillators in SID were not multiplexed, therefore they took up a lot of chip area, constraining the number of voices I could fit on a chip. All ENSONIQ sound chips use a multiplexed oscillator which allows us to produce at least 32 voices per chip. Aside from that, little else of SID is to be found in our designs, which more closely resemble the Mountain Computer sound card for the Apple II (the basis of the Alpha Syntauri system). The DOC I chip (used in the Mirage and ESQ-1) was modeled on this sound card. Our current designs, which include waveform interpolation, digital filters and digital effects are new designs that aren't really based on anything other than our imaginations.” > “The issue wasn't budget, it was development time and chip size constraints. The design/prototype/debug/production schedule of the SID chip, VIC II chip and Commodore 64 were incredibly tight (some would say impossibly tight)--we did things faster than Commodore had ever done before and were never able to repeat after! If I had had more time, I would have developed a proper MOS op-amp which would have eliminated the signal leakage which occurred when the volume of the voice was supposed to be zero. This lead to poor signal-to-noise ratio, although it could be dealt with by stopping the oscillator. It would also have greatly improved the filter, particularly in achieving high resonance. I originally planned to have an exponential look-up table to provide a direct translation for the equal-tempered scale, but it took up too much silicon and it was easy enough to do in software anyway.” https://web.archive.org/web/20070222065716/http://stud1.tuwien.ac.at/~e9426444/yannes.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070222065716/http://stud1.tuwi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Yannes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Yannes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensoniq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensoniq