John Bowen recently posted the following on AH. I asked him if it would be ok for me to put it up as a post and he said yes. This is in regards to the the 1978 NAMM show and the birth of the Prophet 5 and 10. The Prophet 5 was the first fully programmable polyphonic synthesizer. Title link takes you to a shot of the
Audities Foundation Prophet 10, which also came up on the thread (note the Prophet 10 label).
"The original Prophet was a 5 voice. Dave Smith thought to add the second
board (which was just another standard 5 voice board mounted above the
first) as an option, but the synth shown at that 1978 NAMM was a 5
voice, which Dave had barely gotten working earlier that morning (after
working on it almost nonstop the days & nights leading up to the show).
I was at the booth at 10 am as we opened the show, and somehow word had
gotten out about the possibility of us having a programmable
polysynth...we had most all the major manufacturers represented there,
right when the show opened, asking about it. We didn't know what time
Dave was going to show up, and tried to stay mum about the product,
while more and more people showed up. Some time after noon, Dave arrived
with the Prophet under his arm, and we cleared a space for it. He had to
do some quick tweaks and checks, and when he powered it up, it worked
right away (but was pretty badly out-of-tune).
As Michael says, we had enough orders after the show ended to feel great
about the Prophet 5's future, and took those orders to the banks to get
some investment capital to build them.
There were a few persons who Dave had already been selling the Model 800
(sequencer) and Model 700 (programmer) to, one of them being Pat
Gleeson, and when he saw there was an option to have 10 voices, he
immediately order two in that configuration. Dave hadn't really tested
the heat issue with the boards layered, but the first several Prophet
10s made soon proved obvious that there was a tuning instability
problem. After Dave looked further into the situation, he decided it was
not going to be a viable option, so we did recall them. I seem to
remember there were 6 in total sent out, and I the one at Korg R&D was
the only semi-functional one still around (however, there is now someone
doing restoration work on a different single manual P-10 for a museum).
But there was no 'desperate measure' requiring removal of one of the
boards, nor a change of the name...it was always a Prophet 5, and if the
optional 5 voices were to be added, a different sticker was made for the
front panel. Simply an option that didn't work out.
regards,
John Bowen"
