images courtesy of Kevin Lightner

First, about the 100...

"The ADS system comprised a dual-manual splittable keyboard, a video display for envelopes, a 'control cube' the size of a filing cabinet for disk drives and computer hardware, and a rainbow-buttoned front panel for 64-oscillator additive synthesis and real-time sequencing that would have looked at home on the Starship Enterprise of the Star Trek of your choice. The analogy is apt, in fact - the ADS 100's most notable public appearance was in the sound effects for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. No price was given when the ADS 100 was introduced, but it sure looked expensive.

"Well - to reduce a three-year tale to a few words - it was [expensive]. 'We wasted three years,' Ryan recalls. 'We never made a dime off the thing.'

Then came the 200...

"A midget all-in-one box version, the ADS 200, followed soon after. Its display now sported musical notation, the sequencer played back four tracks, the rear panel offered CV and gate interfaces, and the microprocessor count had jumped from three to five. Happily, the multicolored buttons remained and the filing cabinet was nowhere in sight. With the ADS 200, Con Brio's synthesis facility finally rated a description: 'Additive synthesis, phase modulation, frequency modulation, nested phase and frequency modulation, and combinations of all modes.'

[According to Brian Kehew who currently owns one of the ConBrio ADS200's, "the ADS 100 was cannibalized to make the first 200" which is the one he owns. "There was one other made, but it never sold. Originally, it was designed on a PDP11 computer as a tone generator to test cats' hearing!"]

"'It was totally configurable in software,' Ryan says, 'and we had 16 stage envelope generators for both frequency and amplitude, so it was kind of like the grandfather of the Yamaha DX7. On ours, you could build your own algorithms, using any of all of the 64 oscillators in any position in the algorithm. If you wanted additive, you could add 16 of them together. The phase modulation was similar to what Casio did with their CZ series. You could designate any tuning you wanted and save it. You could split the keyboard, stack sounds, model different parts of the keyboard for different parts of the sound, and save that as an entity - the kind of things that are common now.' Compared with the first version, Con Brio's second model was a hit: Of the three instruments manufactured, one was actually sold - for $30,000.

The 200-R

"By 1982, the Con Brio had dropped one of its two manual [keyboards] and, with it, a few thousand from the price tag. The ADS 200-R featured a 16-track polyphonic sequencer with 80,000 note storage capability and editing functions available from the scoring screen. The 32-voice version, expandable to 64, sold (or rather didn't sell) for $20,500, with an additional $25,000 worth of options. Only one was ever built."

[excerpted with permission from the book Vintage Synthesizers by Mark Vail, copyright Miller Freeman, Inc]