The Ensoniq

Ensoniq

Ensoniq Corp. was an American electronics manufacturer, best known throughout the mid 1980s and 1990s for its musical instruments, principally samplers and synthesizers.- Company history :...

 Corporation's Mirage was an 8-bit sampler

Sampler (musical instrument)

A sampler is an electronic musical instrument similar in some respects to a synthesizer but, instead of generating sounds, it uses recordings of sounds that are loaded or recorded into it by the user and then played back by means of a keyboard, sequencer or other triggering device to perform or...

 introduced in 1984. Priced below $2000 with features previously only found on more expensive samplers like the Fairlight CMI

Fairlight CMI

The Fairlight CMI is a digital sampling synthesizer. It was designed in 1979 by the founders of Fairlight, Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, and based on a dual-6800 microprocessor computer designed by Tony Furse in Sydney, Australia...

, it became a best seller.

The Mirage featured a 5-octave velocity sensitive keyboard, a two digit LED display, extensive MIDI implementation and a 333 note sequencer

Music sequencer

The music sequencer is a device or computer software to record, edit, play back the music, by handling note and performance information in several forms, typically :...

, all in 144Kb of RAM. It included a built-in 3.5 inch SSDD floppy drive, which was used to boot the operating system as well as store samples and sequences.