Yamaha DX7

"Pretty much every self respecting producer, studio and composer had one."

"After over a decade of nothing but analogue, musicians were looking for that Next Big Thing, and a mega-corporation just happened to have been working on exactly that. It was dubbed the DX7 and it shook the entire music world upon its release in 1983. Offering a then-staggering 16 voices of polyphony, a full-sized, velocity and aftertouch capable keyboard, the DX7 was different on the outside as well as under the hood."

"The DX7 excelled at convincing electric piano tones, xylophones, marimbas, organs, brass and many other sounds previously hard to do with analogue. Being brighter and richer in the upper harmonics it immediately became a staple in pop music production providing the 80s with it's first really glossy and shiny synth tones."

"The DX7 was the first mass-produced instrument to make use of FM synthesis, a technique devised by John Chowning at Stanford and licensed by Yamaha."

"Analogue was king... Until the first commercially successful digital synthesizer appeared on the scene – the Yamaha DX7. It used a technology called Frequency Modulation (FM) and it [initially] appeared to solve all of the problems of analogue synthesizers: it stayed in tune where analogue was notoriously unreliable; it had eight notes of affordable polyphony where most analogues were still monophonic; it was 8 note polyphonic whereas truly polyphonic synths were much more expensive and even more unreliable; it had 32 recallable presets where analogue synths rarely had that capability. But most of all, it had a whole new range of sounds that were [nearly] impossible to make using analogue technology."

"The release of the Yamaha DX7 in 1983 would prove a watershed moment for music production, as the affordable, versatile device launched an electronic revolution that we are still very much living today. [...] Its “Tubular Bells” preset was essentially the weapon of choice for scores of new age musicians, used most notably on Enya's debut album. And Brian Eno used the synth all over his '80s work, even playing it on U2's “Where the Streets Have No Name.”"