An Interview with E-mu's Founder Dave Rossum

This one in via David Vandenborn of DVDBORN on The MATRIXSYNTH Lounge. theEMUs.com has an interview up with E-mu's founder David Rossum. The following is just the first question and answer for the archives. Click through above for the full interview.

"I read on the internet once that you got inspired to build the first Emulator after having seen the Australian Fairlight CMI at the AES show in 1980. I also want to build a lot of stuff that I see – but I always fail miserably and can’t even get my head around it.
I obviously know that you build modular synthesizers and that you created the technology for keyboards for other companies like Sequential Circuits Inc. and Oberheim Electronics.

What made you so sure you could do a sampler? Had you been experimenting with digital circuitry and RAM based technology prior to this? Did you buy a Fairlight sampler to look at when developing the Emulator – or did you do it differently – from scratch?

To understand fully, you need some background: the situation in May 1980 was that we returned from AES to find that Sequential Circuits was refusing to pay the royalties they had promised, and that we had counted on to fund the marketing of the Audity - which we introduced at the show.

We needed a product soon. Scott Wedge, Marco Alpert and Ed Rudnick had been talking on the drive back from the show, and thought that the Fairlight had one and only one good feature - sampling. We had also seen a Publison Digital Delay that had a capture mode, and the captured (sampled) sound could be played with a control voltage/gate type synthesizer keyboard.

The guys came to me with their ideas, and we had the need for a new MI product quickly to replace the lost Sequential revenue stream.

E-mu was the first company to use a microprocessor in an MI product - our 4060 polyphonic keyboard and digital sequencer, introduced in 1976. We'd done all sorts of stuff with microprocessors - the Audity had a full blown real-time operating system I'd written.

We'd built our own Z-80 development system including disk interfaces, etc. The sequencer in the 4060 used 64K bytes of dynamic RAM. And as I've been previously quoted as saying, "Any asshole can design digital circuits." (Analog is a LOT harder).

We also had been consultants for Roger Linn on the circuit design for the LM-1, so we knew a bit about sampling as well. We'd played with COMDACs in the lab at E-mu as well.

The Fairlight used a separate RAM and a separate CPU for each voice. When Scott, Marco, and Ed came to me with their idea, I knew that such an approach was simply too expensive for an MI product. We'd just have another Audity-class product, competitive with the Fairlight.

So I saw that the key would be to use ONE CPU and ONE memory for all eight voices. The trick was getting the memory bandwidth to accomplish that. The solution was a combination of fast, cheap DMA chips and some FIFO buffers to give them big enough bursts so that the bus negotiation didn't hog too much bandwidth.

So the answer is that we never gave the slightest thought anything but designing the Emulator from scratch. I was revolutionizing the state of the art - building what was in my mind, not duplicating something that I'd seen. And the hardware was the easy part.

The software was the real challenge. The Audity we demo'ed at AES had about 10,000 lines of code, which I'd written in about 3 weeks. The Emulator code base was a similar size, but rather more complex in several ways. Getting both the hardware and software into a form for demonstration at January NAMM 1981 was a real challenge. And that leads to..."

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