Korg OasysPCI

An extremely high quality sound card from Korg, which encompasses synthesis (physical and analogue modelling and more), effects processing, sample playback, digital mixing and multichannel sound I/O. The card was not a commercial success, mainly because it didn't score well in terms of the kinds of features wanted by the mass market (high polyphony, low price) - it was designed very much with quality in mind, rather than quantity. It won't play lots of voices at once, but the voices it does play sound superb.

Dan Phillips at Korg did a lot of work on the OasysPCI as a product (this is one reason I bought one, having known Dan from his days working on the Wavestation), and he has some wonderful effects processing plug-ins available free, which I've used in various performance projects, including Ice Dreams Fire with Laurie Booth.

Various other people have developed synthesis and effects plug-ins for the OasysPCI over the years; the Harm Visser Synth Design patches are well worth a listen, encompassing all sorts of bizarre physical modelling and synthesis.

Software-wise, the OasysPCI is discontinued, and only has drivers and editing software for MacOS up to version 9, and Windows up to ME (although I consider Windows 98SE to be better). There are no drivers for MacOS X or Windows XP. In practice, this means that most OasysPCI users put their cards into old computers and use the cards purely as synthesisers and effects processors, ignoring the (obsolete) audio interface features. At the moment, I have one of my (three) OasysPCI's running purely as a slave, and another working purely as a sound interface on my (MacOS 9) sequencing platform, until I can take that to OS X with something like a MOTU 828.

Links:

• The official Korg OasysPCI page