At the time, the best most of us got was doing FM by toggling address lines fast and sitting a radio next to the CPU cabinet (there was code to do this on the DECUS tape). -AM was out because digital devices tend to be in the constant volts place.
AFAIK the only Amiga that would have come with a DSP in a default configuration is the never released A3000+ which used an AT&T DSP3210. Prototypes of the A3000+ existed in 1991.
The major contribution of the original Atari STs to music were the built-in MIDI ports, which made it easy and simple to connect digital synthesizers, keyboards, etc. The music capabilities of a regular ST were rather constrained due to its outdated AY-3-8910/YM2149 sound chip (the SID in a C64 was more capable). Only the STE introduced PCM audio.
I guess someone more knowledgable about Amigas than me can add some facts about its sound capabilities.
[1] https://stcarchiv.de/stc1993/10/interview-atari-bob-gleadow
Not influencial in the way the Cube is described here, as the platforms were a class of apps was developed in, more used practical applications.
And it was used in serious modern music, as practiced in the various modern music departments on the best universities, even when they did have the big money. In Graz they had this MAX/Next setup from IRCAM and simulated opera singers, in Paris at the IRCAM which did a famous movie with it, the Neitherlands, Gent and Montreal.
They continue to work on PureData, but it began taking over the industry with Ableton then. And with all it free clones.
You're probably right that approximately noone was making rave and jungle on NeXT machines, but on the other hand it's true that approximately noone was doing academic electronic composition on Amiga or Atari, which is really the tradition that this is referring to. And these were mostly separate worlds for another decade.
Aphex Twin used Amigas, not NeXTCubes.
No love for Fairlight?
Put their headphones on. The sound seems to come from one side. Turn your head towards it. The sound comes straight in front of you. Intuitive and neat. In all VR headsets nowadays... Very cool place.
The Amiga, on the other hand, didn't have that (or even a synth chip), but it did have the Paula chip, which gave you the ability to play four channels of samples, which got you (generally) 8-14 bit/22 kHz output on the original machines. On that side of the fence you got a lot of trackers - four channel sequencers - to take advantage of the digital audio.
It was the direct ancestor of today's VST/AU/AAX/etc synth and FX plugin market.
I really disagree about it as a direct ancestor of the contemporary plugin API. These have always run on the host CPU, not dedicated DSP chips (excluding of course Digidesign's original ProTools model, but that was DSP farm rather than just a chip).
And the sort of DSP that was being done on the Cube DSP was being done before the Cube too.
I'm not so much griping at the idea of characterizing it as a media machine, but one of the first? It's not even one of the first digital multitrack recorders.
The Fairlight was aimed at the high end music market. It did some very specific things and nothing but those very specific things. It was super-useful for music production, but it was - in its high-end way - a closed end user product, not an open development system.
The problem with the Cube - aside from the price - was that the DSP hardware was still quite slow. Although you could develop your own applications they were very limited compared to the commercial synths, samplers, and FX processors that were available commercially.
So it was only really useful for prototyping new concepts for applications, rather than producing finished applications.
That's where Max came from. Initially it was a very minimal sort-of-modular MIDI processor. The IRCAM merged it with their Cube-based synthesis and processing system. Eventually that became Max/MSP, a commercial product with both MIDI and audio generation and processing. (Then video and low-level custom DSP were added, but those are much more recent.)
Miller Puckette, the original author of Max, left IRCAM and went on to develop Pure Data (Pd) as an open source alternative. Pd introduced realtime audio processing. Max integrated Pd's DSP code and became Max/MSP. MSP stands for 'multi signal processing' or 'Miller S. Puckette'. (Miller himself named Max after computer music pioneer Max Mathews.)
Yeah, but at the same time a comparable plain 'business' Mac (without soundcard and DAC cost in the order of $5000). So, $10K is not so far off if you have a regular studio (most regular pro gear had comparable prices and you needed dozens of them, H3000s, compressors, reverbs, and so on) or a music research facilicy, etc.
When NeXT was folded back into Apple, the audio classes eventually became (more or less) the AUs in MacOS.
An abstraction layer made it possible to run natively, or on internal DSP, or on external DSP. Aside from Digi, Waves, Universal Audio, TC Electronic, and Focusrite all made external processors that used the AU/VST interface. (UA still do, although recently they - at last - also started offering native versions of some of their plugins.)
Waves in particular, who I worked with in the 2007-2014 era, did not do this until Linux got into shape to allow them to build plugin/DSP servers.
That's like saying "computing in the 80s was all about the home computer market, if we exclude the PC". ProTools was the biggest name (and quite close to a monopoly for pros at the time).
ProTools had a separate box that had the DSP farm in it. There was nothing particular unique about that (at the time) (though running a DAW on it was definitely novel when they did it).