The Perfect DAW in MacOS

Jeremy Spencer said:

I had an Ensoniq Mirage and ESP, wanted PARIS but it was too pricey. I recall it was around $5k in 1992.

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PARIS didn't come out until the end of 1997 (I was waiting very patiently for it for months) I paid $2,000 for my initial setup from G.C. (a Control 16, 1 EDS card and a 442 Interface if I recall correctly). When you add in the MEC, In & Out cards, extra EDS 1000 cards, ADAT and additional controller purchased later as I progressed with the system - yes it approached $4,000.

Lots of folks say it was the best and warmest sounding DAW ever, (to this day)! Not sure about that, but it WAS a great, very warm sounding system at the time - for digital.
After Stephen St. Croix passed, Edmund Pirali, Steve's partner (Intelligent Devices) continued running it and a lot of problems popped up and just seemed to stifle further developement and pretty much killed it off. There even followed a lawsuit by users to get the 3.0 software released to the user environment after the demise but I don't know how that ended up.
There still exists a user group - forum, run by Kerry Galloway online.

alcorey said:

PARIS didn't come out until the end of 1997 (I was waiting very patiently for it for months) I paid $2,000 for my initial setup from G.C. (a Control 16, 1 EDS card and a 442 Interface if I recall correctly). When you add in the MEC, In & Out cards, extra EDS 1000 cards, ADAT and additional controller purchased later as I progressed with the system - yes it approached $4,000.

Lots of folks say it was the best and warmest sounding DAW ever, (to this day)! Not sure about that, but it WAS a great, very warm sounding system at the time - for digital.
After Stephen St. Croix passed, Edmund Pirali, Steve's partner (Intelligent Devices) continued running it and a lot of problems popped up and just seemed to stifle further developement and pretty much killed it off. There even followed a lawsuit by users to get the 3.0 software released to the user environment after the demise but I don't know how that ended up.
There still exists a user group - forum, run by Kerry Galloway online.

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D'oh! Thanks for the timeframe correction, it's all a blur! Yes, it was the fully souped-up setup I was after.

In the early 90's I worked with Steve St. Croix and Edmund Pirali on the DPR-44, a digital workstation developed for a Seattle manufacturer, who later canceled the project in 1993. It was a cool design, and nearly made it to production. Here are two of Steve's renderings:

papah said:

In the early 90's I worked with Steve St. Croix and Edmund Pirali on the DPR-44, a digital workstation developed for a Seattle manufacturer, who later canceled the project in 1993. It was a cool design, and nearly made it to production. Here are two of Steve's renderings:

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Wow, cool, has quite some resemblance to the original Paris 2.0 software!
Shame that it fizzled - probably a lot of blood, sweat and tears (and dollars) lost there

danstein said:

You guys with Deck II were late to the game. I had a Mac IIci with a Digidesign Audiomedia card in it (2 ins and 2 outs on RCAs) running Sound Designer (the original Pro Tools ancestor).

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Yeah? Well I have a IIci in my garage. So there!

(Now, finding it would be another matter. I have no idea where in that mess it is. )

By the way, was SD an ancestor of Pro Tools? It certainly was an earlier Digidesign product, but it was quite different - RAM-based rather than streaming, for one.

Nostalgia. I miss Paris. I miss Deck-II. What do they say... you never forget your first... which was Deck II for me. I miss Peak too, though not a DAW, same timeframe though I think.

Paris was actually developed by Ensoniq and Steven/Edmund right before the Emu/Ensoniq merger resulting from the Creative buyout.

Good times...

Edit: I take that back - first for me was Logic on Atari, how could I forget

Nick Batzdorf said:

Yeah? Well I have a IIci in my garage. So there!

(Now, finding it would be another matter. I have no idea where in that mess it is. )

By the way, was SD an ancestor of Pro Tools? It certainly was an earlier Digidesign product, but it was quite different - RAM-based rather than streaming, for one.

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I had one (including the Audiomedia card) in my studio storage until I moved from Brooklyn a few years ago. I do still have my original MacSE with the 9” black & white screen and built-in floppy drives.

SD may not be a code-base predecessor of PT, but (at least to my deteriorating memory) SD brought the concept of graphical editing of digital audio to the “general public” so in that sense it’s a conceptual ancestor.

After a lot of thought and soul searching I've decided to go ahead and go 100% with Cool Edit Pro! Who is with me??!

I used Vision in the pre Studio Vision days. I switched to Logic when it first came out as Notator Logic in the early 90s.

I recently found some old Vision floppies -- which reminds me that PACE already used to make like difficult 30 years ago! They had to send me another floppy as the original one would no longer authorise. I hate that kind of customer-hostile copy protection and still dislike PACE to this day LOL

I really liked Vision though. It was such a shame it got killed. There were many aspects of it I much preferred to Logic and it had a much nicer Piano roll and subsequences, etc. But Logic could talk to my Fostex 8 track and had the arrange window and parameter box and most importantly was incredibly fast and you didn't have to stop the transport when you edited parameters etc. Which I think you did with Vision? My memory is hazy. I definitely missed being able to easily trigger sequences from the QWERTY keyboard (Logic's touch tracks were no substitute) and the step editor was also much better on Vision... But Logic stuck and it's still my DAW today.