The SoundscapeDB is an Ensoniq

Ensoniq

Ensoniq Corp. was an American electronics manufacturer, best known throughout the mid 1980s and 1990s for its musical instruments, principally samplers and synthesizers.- Company history :...

-designed and produced MIDI daughtercard designed to interface with the "Waveblaster" header available on many older sound card

Sound card

A sound card is an internal computer expansion card that facilitates the input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under control of computer programs. The term sound card is also applied to external audio interfaces that use software to generate sound, as opposed to using hardware...

s. It was released in 1994.

During the early 1990s, Creative Labs created the Waveblaster connector for their Sound Blaster 16

Sound Blaster 16

The Sound Blaster 16 is a series of sound cards by Creative Technology. They are add-on boards for PCs with an ISA or PCI slot.-Sound Blaster 16:Sound Blaster 16 , the successor to the Sound Blaster Pro, introduced 16-bit digital audio sampling to the Sound Blaster line...

 sound cards. This connector would be for their wavetable

Wavetable synthesis

Wavetable synthesis is used in certain digital music synthesizers to implement a restricted form of real-time additive synthesis. The technique was first developed by Wolfgang Palm of PPG in the late 1970s and published in 1979, and has since been used as the primary synthesis method in...

 upgrade daughtercard, which they also called the Waveblaster. Other sound card manufacturers took advantage of this and put the connector on their cards as well, and many manufacturers also began developing their own upgrade daughtercards.

Ensoniq's daughterboard (DB), the SoundscapeDB, is basically a Soundscape S-2000

Ensoniq Soundscape S-2000

Soundscape S-2000 was Ensoniq's first direct foray into the PC sound card market. The card arrived on the market in 1994. It is a full-length ISA digital audio and wavetable synthesis device, equipped with a 2 MiB Ensoniq-built ROM-based patch set...

 with the digital sound reproduction section removed. It was simply the MIDI synthesizer of the full Soundscape. The DB contained an Ensoniq OTTOR2

Ensoniq ES-5506 OTTO

The Ensoniq ES-5506 "OTTO" was a 32 voice wavetable oscillator chip used in implementations of wavetable synthesizers. Musical instruments and PC sound cards were the most popular applications....

 synthesizer chip, a Motorola 68EC000 controller, and a 2 MB

Megabyte

The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000...

 patch set ROM. Ensoniq switched to a "revised and improved" 1 MB ROM patch set in a cost-cutting move on a later revision of the board.

Specifications

• 1 MB or 2 MB (depending on revision) compressed patch set ROM
• 32 Simultaneous Voices, 32 Note Polyphony
  Polyphony
  In music, polyphony is a texture consisting of two or more independent melodic voices, as opposed to music with just one voice or music with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords ....
  
  , 16 Channels
• 128 General MIDI
  General MIDI
  General MIDI or GM is a standardized specification for music synthesizers that respond to MIDI messages. GM was developed by the MIDI Manufacturers Association and the Japan MIDI Standards Committee and first published in 1991...
  
   Instruments, 61 Drum Programs
• Full Soundscape CD Quality Sound
• SoundscapeDB is compatible with sound boards equipped with 26-pin expansion connector. Including:
  • Creative Labs, Inc. - Sound Blaster
    Sound Blaster
    The Sound Blaster family of sound cards was the de facto standard for consumer audio on the IBM PC compatible system platform, until the widespread transition to Microsoft Windows 95, which standardized the programming interface at application level , and the evolution in PC design led to onboard...
    
     16, Sound Blaster 16 BASIC, Sound Blaster 16 ASP, Sound Blaster 16 SCSI-2, AWE32
  • AZTECH Labs, Inc. - Sound Galaxy NX Pro 16, Sound Galaxy Pro 16 Extra
  • Also compatible with many REVEAL and Packard Bell
    Packard Bell
    Packard Bell is a Dutch computer manufacturer and a subsidiary of Acer. The name was previously used by Packard Bell, an American radio manufacturer founded in 1926. In 1986, Israeli investors bought the name for a newly formed personal computer manufacturer. Originally the company produced...
    
    multimedia products.