Mantis
Inheriting a Legendary Designer’s Last Synth
Chris Huggett founded the Oxford Synthesiser Company in the 1970s. He spent his career designing what later became classic gear: the EDP Wasp and OSCar synthesisers, most of Akai's samplers in the 1990s, and pretty much all of Novation's musical instruments.
In 2019, Chris took on a commission for a new company. Given creative free rein, he started developing a hybrid synth that revisited and extended favourite parts of his earliest work, but with modern features. Unfortunately, he was diagnosed with cancer at around the same time, and didn't survive the first lockdown.
Having worked with Chris for a while at Novation, and being a little involved with the same new company, I was standing in a footlight when the music stopped. The contents of Chris's desk and hard drive were opened up: a well-conceived but technically rough proof of concept; hardware and firmware assembled from a variety of sources with some clever touches. With the blessing of his estate, we were given permission to see what we might do with them.
As a solo engineer, my job was to understand the context and intentions embodied in Chris's draft, to shape and polish it without losing his fingerprints, and to see it into production before the money ran out.
This talk will cover as many of the technically interesting aspects of this work I can manage: wrangling somebody else's proof-of-concept hardware into something manufacturable, taking ownership of a messy and sketchy codebase without breaking it, and knowing where to stop.
Ben Supper
Prioprietor
Supperware Ltd
Ben engineers synthesisers, loudspeakers, MIDI controllers, and other products for various companies, and sells spatial audio hardware via his own company, Supperware.
He likes solving problems that combine elements of acoustic design, hardware, firmware, DSP, and application development. The first half of his career was spent mostly at Focusrite and ROLI, running the latter's R&D team and realising that he prefers the lab to the boardroom, but doesn't get to choose.
Ben's been involved with ADC since it started in 2015. He's spoken about MIDI, spatial audio, the craft of making hardware, and on weathering a demanding and satisfying trade, the practitioners of which are often invisible.
