My first "add-on" sound generator was an Acorn Music 500 digital synthesizer for the BBC Micro (model B).
I acquired it in 1985, I believe.
And IIRC, it had 16-voice wavetable synthesis, ~48KHz sample rate, but no filters.
Still have it somewhere in the outhouse, along with the BBC Micro. Need to go see sometime.
While it definitely was shelves above the beep-on-beep-off of the computer speaker I had so far, it didn't quite get me where I wanted to be (think early to mid-80's samplers on pop records -Art of Noise, Jean Michel Jarre, ABC, Peter Gabriel etc).
In response, my dear home-computer-nerding friends then for a birthday gave me a "go-do kit" consisting of a Zilog Z80, an 8-bit DAC and an 8-bit ADC chip + sockets. Go build & program a Fairlight yourself...
Probably no need to say the project was never finished, and no sound from that contraption was heard.
![:-(](./images/smilies/icon_frown.gif)
(In fact, I may still also have the board and those chips in the outhouse somewhere!)
I think the next thing I got was a Soundblaster Pro or something like that for a 80386sx-based PC, but that was 1988 or so.
Nevertheless, I did get somewhat back on my friends 'gift' - just a couple of years later, I was working as an audio engineer and programmer at a local recording studio, where we among other boards had a Farlight series III (16-bit machine). Couldn't get much better than that at the time (late 80's)!
Yay!
Of course, my iPhone these days can do all of that, and more, and I'm doing something completely different
![:o](./images/smilies/icon_eek.gif)