Aphex Twin made this obscure British digital wave synthesizer the centerpiece of his sound in the early 1990s, which tells you something about its potential despite its reputation for being nearly impossible to program. Designed by Mike Lynch for Cheetah International in 1989, the MS800 arrived as an affordable entry point into wavetable synthesis at a time when similar gear cost significantly more.
The MS800 is a half-rack module built from steel with 15-voice polyphony and 16-part multitimbral MIDI support, letting you layer different sounds across multiple MIDI channels with dynamic voice allocation. It uses 8-bit companded digital wavetable synthesis with 21 waveforms that you sequence together to create evolving textures similar to PPG or Korg Wavestation, except without any filtering—which gives it that distinctive gritty, aliased character that's either a feature or a bug depending on what you're after. Each patch contains up to 14 tones, and you can program velocity crossfades between waveforms to shape how sounds respond to your playing. The module stores 50 patches and 50 tones in ROM plus another 50 of each in RAM, all editable from the front panel and saveable via MIDI SysEx. Rear connections include MIDI In/Out/Thru, stereo audio outputs, and a power inlet.
Here's where things get real: the interface is a two-digit LED display and ten push buttons, which makes programming feel like solving a puzzle with your eyes closed. The manual is dense text with minimal graphics, and there's no computer editor to ease the pain. That said, people who've invested the time swear by its lo-fi digital weirdness and the bell-like tones it excels at creating. It's genuinely one of a kind, built for the patient and experimental.
