A modular synthesizer company in Great Britain that had their heyday in the 1980s. Designer Charles Blakeley founded the company in 1977 and started with a line of modules called the 20000 series. This was not very successful, so in 1980 he introduced a second line, called the Digisound 80 line. This was far more successful.
The irony of course is that Digisound was getting into modular at a time when other manufacturers were getting out of it. However, this may have paradoxically contributed to the Digisound 80 line's success; there still existed a certain level of interest in modular, and in Great Britain Digisound had that market pretty much to themselves throughout the decade. The series relied on a a combination o old and new approaches. The old was appealing to the DIY community. Digisound's designs were published in Electronics Today International and other electronics-hobbyist magazines, and modules were available in any state of completion ranging from bare circuit boards to completely assembled. The new was that, instead of designs based on discrete components, Blakely designed most of his modules around integrated circuits from Curtis. For instance, the 80-2 VCO was based on the Curtis 3340. The designs were noted for exposing more of the capabilities of the Curtis IC's than their more conventional uses in 1980s polysynths.
Digisound's format was based on a 9" tall by 3" wide (22.9x7.6 cm) panel. having a white (extant examples have now yellowed) background with black graphics. Blakely took a cue from the earlier Aries modulars by using 3.5 mm phone jacks for interconnects, and grouping the jacks at the bottom of each panel. However, many customers designed and fabricated their own panels rather than buy them from Digisound, or incorporated them into other types of construction, so completed units ended up appearing on the market in a wide variety of user-created formats. Over five years, 25 modules were designed and offered, along with a scanning keyboard that had the capability to drive a polyphonic system, if one's modular had enough modules to assemble multiple voices.
Unfortunately, Charles Blakeley passed away in 1984 or 1985. Tim Higham took over the business in 1987 and resumed selling the existing products, but by 1990 the supply of Curtis IC's was drying up, after On-Chip Systems took over Curtis and ceased production of most of the music circuits. Production of the Digisound products ended sometime in the early 1990s.