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Ts-10 Soundfont -sf2-: Ensoniq
Leo’s workstation was a beige Pentium II running Windows 98. His tools: a Turtle Beach Pinnacle sound card with a proprietary S/PDIF input, a copy of Chicken Systems Translator , and a mountain of pirated RAM. His process was monastic.
Sonic Foundry released the SoundFont on a CD-ROM in April 1999. It cost $99. It sold 400 copies. The reviews were tepid: "Too big for consumer sound cards," "The loops aren't perfect," "Just buy a used TS-10." Ensoniq TS-10 SoundFont -SF2-
Today, the Ensoniq TS-10 SoundFont lives in the dark corners of thousands of hard drives. You can hear it if you know where to listen. It’s the warm, unstable pad on that lo-fi hip-hop track with 2 million YouTube views. It’s the brittle piano on that indie game soundtrack that made you nostalgic for a childhood you never had. It’s the bass in that techno track that shakes the subwoofer at 3 AM in a warehouse in Detroit. Leo’s workstation was a beige Pentium II running
Three months in, with 47 patches converted, a power surge fried his Pinnacle card. The hard drive with the raw samples was corrupted. He had backups of the loops, but the original multi-samples—the 2,000+ individual notes—were gone. The TS-10 was a rental. It was due back in two days. Sonic Foundry released the SoundFont on a CD-ROM
In the winter of 1998, the air in the Los Angeles recording studio The Vault smelled of ozone, stale coffee, and ambition. Leo Focht, a 47-year-old sound designer with a hearing range that engineers swore defied physics, stared at the instrument that had consumed his last six months: an Ensoniq TS-10.
Leo smiles. “That’s it,” he whispers. “That’s the sound.”
The SF2 format allowed for up to 27 different modulators. The TS-10 had 16 real-time controllers. Leo spent two weeks just mapping the aftertouch to filter cutoff response. On the TS-10, it was exponential—a light touch added warmth, a hard squeeze added bite. In SF2, he had to build a piecewise linear curve. He failed. Then he failed again. Finally, he wrote a custom script in an ancient version of Python that brute-force calculated 128 breakpoints. At 4 AM on a Tuesday, he played the converted patch. He pressed down on his MIDI keyboard’s aftertouch. The sound screamed . He cried. Just a little.