digital audio | 1993

in 1993 or 1992 i bought an apple mac called the “pizzabox“. i gave it back pretty instantly because at that time a much more pricy mac came out, the “centris 650“. why pay more? well, in those days professional digital audio editing was not possible with windows computers, due to the unstable clocking of the CPU. the apple macs as standalone systems could not handle it either. but with an extension card it became possible. that card, the digidesign audiomedia II, was heaven. from then on i could digitize audio (the interviews i did for example) in high quality, edit it on the mac (using a digidesign software named sounddesigner II) and burn CDs for radio broadcast. i was the first journalist and DJ to do this at german public radio. that card made me independent from booking studio time in broadcasting house. and it ran absolutely stable.

digidesign audio cards. photo: ms / dpa/pictureAlliance

the NUBUS connection was apple‘s first opening to the outer world. before that mac OS was a closed system.

in the photograph above you see two cards. the one in the back is digidesign‘s sampleCell II. as expensive as the audiomedia II, but much less used by me. it was a card dedicated to sampling — which was en vogue and very expensive at that time.