E-MU Systems
The company E-MU Systems is a manufacturer of audio engineering equipment. It was founded in 1971 and was a pioneer in the production of synthesizers and samplers. The company was acquired multimedia, computer hardware manufacturer Creative Labs in 1993 and merged with the also acquired company Ensoniq. However, it is still active.
Sampler
The company became known for a series of compilations under the name of the emulator.
The first version, the emulator I came onto the market in 1981 and was the first sampler, the "affordable" was with a price of around U.S. $ 10,000, compared with the Fairlight CMI, which cost about ten times. Data could initially be stored on 5.25 " floppies.
The emulator I followed the 1984 and 1987 Emulator II Emulator III. There followed in 1985 the drum machine SP -12 and 1988 its successor model SP -1200, which is reproduced wurde.Beide devices are now being traded as a rarity, since they are due to their harsh lo-fi sound and hard timings due to the great success in 1993 and 1997 today enjoy great popularity in hip-hop and dance producers.
As the successor of the Emulator III E IV has been introduced. This extensible via plug in sampler was over several generations ( E IV, IV E XT, XT Ultra E IV ) were further developed in order to achieve his final and most advanced stage of development in the E IV Platinum. This device offered 128 voices with as many filters, 128 MB Ram, 16 analog and 16 digital outputs and a single complex multi-effects processor ( " RFX -Board" ).
In addition to the emulators E -MU ESI also produced the series. Here, it was stripped down devices. The first unit of this series was the ESI 32 with 32 votes and a maximum of 32 MB of Ram. Successor was the 4000 ESI, who could manage up to 128MB Ram and 64 votes possessed. The last unit of this series was the ESI in 2000, which with the ESI 4000 was technically the same but had a revised color scheme and was delivered with a much more extensive sample library.
Expander
Furthermore, the company produced a number of successful, because at the same time affordable and versatile rack-mounted devices under the name " Proteus " on the basis of high-quality ROM samples ( ROMpler ).
More products in this line were, inter alia, Orbit, Carnival, Extreme Lead, Planet Phat and Phat Mo, which in many dance, techno and hip-hop productions found use from the mid- 1990s. All units are internally basically the same, often only differ in the used ROM blocks in which the sounds are housed. An important advantage of the device compared to similar systems was extensive setting for the synth and filter sections of the so-called Beat mode, in which prefabricated drums and sound samples were played independently. In addition, a pure stand-alone operation was possible because a song list on the basis concatenator left could be deposited on each one of the beats. This made it possible to connect multiple devices without any external MIDI sources to run in parallel and to mix the sounds in the style of a DJ.
The later units of this series possessed ROM slots into which modules could be retrofitted with additional sound material. These modules could be make series with samplers from the E IV Ultra.
Current activities
Today, Creative sold under this label professional audio accessories for computers, such as sound cards.