The ASR-10 was a follow-up product to the very popular Ensoniq EPS and EPS-16 Plus performance samplers, and was also available with a piano style weighted keyboard (ASR-88) and a rackmount version (ASR-10R).

The ASR-10, like its predecessors, was a true performance orientated sampling workstation, and did not require a computer or additional equipment in order to create a complete song.

The supplied "Musician's Manual" lived up to Ensoniq's documentation practice, with a highly readable, very hands-on and quite complete description of the device.

The effects were all programmable, and flexible configurations were available for operating in multitimbral or performance modes.

These patch-select buttons (an Ensoniq trademark) allowed the player to instantly recall during performance any one of four pre-programmed combinations of the eight layers to be sounded.

This allowed it to function as an early digital two track hard disk recorder.

ASR-10s running the most recent OS version have no issues with Iomega Zip drives.

(The decision to go with a proprietary format was to get around the then-limitation of DOS filenames which were limited to 8 characters.)

There are many computer programs that allow reading, writing, and formatting Ensoniq's disk and file system, among those made by Chicken Systems (Translator and Disk Tools), and a German programmer named Thoralt who created ensoniqfs, a filesystem plugin for Total Commander.

Ensoniq's architecture allowed a sound to be loaded from floppy while the keyboard was operational.