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Synth wars: The story of MIDI (2023)
CV/Gate, DCB, USI, UMI and The Oberheim System… This is the story of how synth’s biggest players narrowly averted a standards war and made sweet music together
Every synth maker would be in town - Moog, ARP, Yamaha, Roland, Korg, Voyetra, Syntauri, Octave Plateau - and Smith found a willing audience, if only to find out what hot new machine Sequential Circuits had up its sleeve next. It’s therefore a bit of a minor miracle that when MIDI was revealed to the world, on the Sequential Circuits stand at the NAMM show in January 1983 (precisely one year since Smith’s proposal got the brush off), that the system worked at all. Within a year, as Smith predicted, practically every manufacturer was on board, and even if you don't even own a 5-pin DIN cable, MIDI’s standards and protocol are likely still churning away in your studio behind the scenes, empowering creators and ensuring compatibility between every piece of music hardware and software.
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