Korg Wavestation AD

I'm glad you especially liked the A/D, since it was my pet project at
Korg after we finished the original model.  I'm Joe Bryan, formerly
the senior design engineer at Korg, and recently moved to Chromatic
Research.  Among other things, I developed the Wavestation's DSP
effects system, and made the A/D the A/D.
After the original WS went into production, there was the standard lull
while we figured out what to do next.  Since Korg R&D had emerged from
the ashes of Sequential Circuits after the Yamaha buyout, we had a lot
of old Sequential prototypes sitting around collecting dust on the
shelves of the lab.  One of these was an old Prophet 2000 sampler
proto, with the analog converters neatly arranged and isolated in a
corner of the board.
With the big Prophet board clamped in a bench vise, I noisily hacksawed
out the converter circuits while a few of the other engineers held
their ears.  This was followed by the usual sanity test along the
lines of "What the @#!* are you doing now?"  I hand-soldered a digital
interface circuit to connect the converters to the Wavestation's rom
data bus, and the first A/D was born.
Since I'm a guitar player not a keyboard player, I wanted something
that worked with a simple midi guitar that would merge the guitar,
synth and effects, and could be controlled from one or two buttons on
the guitar.  I'd presented the idea to everyone before, but no one was
very interested.  However, with a real prototype in hand, it caught on
pretty fast.
I'm glad to hear there's still a lot of interest in the Wavestation
after all these years.