Turning back to nineties, it's easy to see that almost all ventures into specialty hardware ended up with mainstream consumer CPUs catching up, and swallowing the niche in a few years time as computer science, and logic design advanced.
Very few computing tasks came out to be truly brute force demanding as people learned how things really work.
Multi-channel audio, and sound effects on CPUs — once thought to be impossible, are now everywher, even smartphone chips.
Getting there was very tough though. Very few people can write a software DSP, and accoustically correct mixers with real time performance even today.
Turning back to nineties, it's easy to see that almost all ventures into specialty hardware ended up with mainstream consumer CPUs catching up, and swallowing the niche in a few years time as computer science, and logic design advanced.
Very few computing tasks came out to be truly brute force demanding as people learned how things really work.
Multi-channel audio, and sound effects on CPUs — once thought to be impossible, are now everywher, even smartphone chips.
Getting there was very tough though. Very few people can write a software DSP, and accoustically correct mixers with real time performance even today.