E-mu Systems

» see emu.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

E-mu started in 1971 in Santa Cruz, out of the kind of university electronic music setup where a physics-minded student gets access to an oscillator and does not leave. Dave Rossum was that student. Scott Wedge came in as the business half. Through the seventies the company sold enormous modular synthesizers and, more profitably, sold parts and designs to other synth makers, including the keyboard scanning circuit that ended up under a good deal of somebody else's product.

The thing that made the company was the Emulator, shown in 1981 and shipping the year after. It recorded a sound and let you play it back across a keyboard. That was not a new idea. The Fairlight CMI had been doing it in Australia since 1979 for roughly thirty thousand dollars, which meant it belonged to studios and to musicians famous enough to be lent one. The Emulator cost $7,900. It was still a serious amount of money and it was a completely different order of money, and the effect was that sampling stopped being a technology you read about and became a technology on a shop counter.

Then the Emulator II in 1984 and the cheaper Emax behind it. The Proteus rack module came in 1990 and dropped the sampling entirely, giving you a box full of good sounds in ROM for well under a thousand dollars. By the early nineties E-mu was one of the two or three names in American electronic instruments and it had moved down the road to Scotts Valley.

~ the dossier ~

~ twelve bits and ten seconds ~

The SP-12 arrived in 1985 and the SP-1200 in 1987, and neither was designed to be a legendary object. They were drum machines with a sampler attached, aimed at people who wanted their own snare rather than the factory one. The SP-1200 gave you twelve-bit resolution and ten and a bit seconds of total sampling time, which by the standards of the period was a compromise on both axes.

Those two limitations became the sound of a decade of hip-hop. Twelve bits at that sample rate put a specific grain on everything that went through it, and ten seconds forced producers to chop rather than loop. Records made on an SP-1200 are identifiable by ear thirty-five years later. E-mu discontinued it in 1998 and secondhand prices went up rather than down, which almost never happens to a piece of digital equipment.

~ the chip years ~

Creative Technology bought E-mu in 1993. What Creative wanted was not the keyboards. It was thirty years of accumulated knowledge about how to make a small amount of silicon play back a large number of samples at once, and it put that knowledge on a card. The EMU8000 went into the Sound Blaster AWE32 in 1994 and brought with it the SoundFont format, which let you load your own instrument banks into a sound card. The EMU10K1 followed in 1998 inside the Sound Blaster Live!

That last one is the part of this company I actually touched. A Sound Blaster Live! was the default answer on any reasonable Turkish home PC around 1999 and in the internet cafes a couple of years after that, back when a sound card was still a separate thing you bought and argued about. I had no idea at the time that the audio chip in it came from a Santa Cruz sampler company, and nobody selling it had any reason to mention it. Creative did not put the E-mu name on the box.

~ the wind-down ~

Creative bought Ensoniq in January 1998 and merged the two into a single division, which is how the two most important American sampler companies ended up in the same building under a Singaporean parent. A last round of entry-level keyboards came out in 2002 and then the E-mu and Ensoniq division was dissolved, with legacy support wound down shortly after. Creative kept using the E-mu name on PC audio interfaces and on Emulator X software for a few more years, with none of the original operation behind any of it.

Dave Rossum came back in 2015 with Rossum Electro-Music, building Eurorack modules, including a re-engineered version of the sampling engine he designed in the eighties. Rossum Electro-Music is the only part of this story still shipping hardware.

emu.com is live as of this writing. It serves one page, styled with Creative's stylesheets, and the page says that E-MU Systems is currently undergoing a structural transformation and is quietly engineering the next generation of high-fidelity audio tools. There is an email address, and behind it no product and no name of anybody responsible. A company that stopped existing twenty-four years ago has a homepage in the present tense.

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