Ensoniq mirage owner manual

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INTRODUCTION When it was introduced in 1984, the Mirage Digital Sampling Keyboard made history by being the first truly affordable sampling keyboard - the Mirage put sampled sounds into the hands of musicians who didn't have the price of a house to s pend on a keyboard. It has gone on to become the most popular sampler ever made. It is also the best supported, with hundreds of sounds available on diskette from ENSONIQ and other third party developers, as well as a wealth of computer software and other peripherals. The Mirage DSK represents a continuation of ENSONIQ 's commitment to providing its customers with low-cost, high-quality musical instr uments. Thanks to a series of design improvements and more efficient production techniqu es, it is possible to offer an instrument with the same fine sound quality and virtually all the f eatures of the original Mirage at a substantially reduced price. Plus, the Mirage DSK features the ad ded enhancement of stereo circuitry. All the sounds ever developed for the Mirage will p lay on the Mirage DSK, including the popular ENSONIQ Sound Diskette Library, which cover s the full range of musical instruments and other effects. See your ENSONIQ dealer for deta ils about the Sound Library. The Mirage is an eight-voice polyphonic digital sam pling keyboard instrument - in many ways similar to and in just as many ways different from a synthesizer. The Mirage allows you to personally program sounds like many synthesizers an d also features an on-board sequencer. But, in addition, the Mirage will permit you to sample j ust about any sound you hear and create music with it. It's best described as a computer specially designe d to reproduce and process sound. Like all computers, it is a system consisting of two main pa rts--hardware and software. And here's where it differs most from synthesizers.

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Hardware The hardware of the Mirage is everything that comes in the box with the exception of the information on the mini-diskettes. The hardware its elf cannot make any sound. It's an engine without fuel. What the hardware can do is reproduce process and modify the sound information included on the diskettes. Software The information contained on the mini-diskettes is called software; this information consists of all the data necessary for the Mirage hardware to r eproduce a sound. When this information is transferred, or loaded, into the memory of the Mira ge, the hardware is ready to reproduce that sound or modify it in a nearly unlimited number of ways. You, the user, can create your own software by taki ng sounds you record with the Mirage hardware and transferring that information onto a s pecially formatted Mirage diskette for future use. This process is called saving. Because all of the crucial sound information is inc luded as software, your Mirage will never be obsolete. An ever-growing library of sounds is avai lable from Ensoniq that will keep your Mirage fresh and new for years to come. Digital Sampling As it applies to music, digital sampling is a compu ter term that basically means "recording," In concept, it's very similar to tape recording--an el ectronic representation of a sound, or audio signal, is stored in some location where it can be read and changed back into a sound at some future time. Tape recording uses audio tape to store the audio s ignal. Digital sampling uses sophisticated digital circuitry (and eventually, computer diskett es) to store the signal. In digital sampling, the signal is stored as bits of computer information. W hile in this digital form, the signal can be modified in many ways, without deteriorating the au dio quality and without the mechanical limitations of tape recording.