emusonacid!

Just wandered over to E-mu's web site for the first time in a couple of months, and my brain started storming (particularly after browsing the colourful E-mu product history timeline page). Nice re-design of the site, by the way... they finally added legacy hardware to the support product selection thingy (although it still goes to the exact same legacy hardware list page as the tiny link under the thingy... but at least it's easier to find now).

Now, I'm not exactly expecting answers to these questions, just posing them for the further pondering of the general masses (or members of this board).

So, my thoughts go like this...

1) Are the current E-mu sound cards based on the G and H chip technology that Dave Rossum developed, the chips that made the "E-mu sound" famous among serious (and not quite so serious) musicians?
(obvious follow up question if the answer is "no" would be "well, why the hell not?" ... dammit, I want a Morpheus on a PCI card, driven by a 3GHz processor instead of a sub-22MHz one!) I really started to wonder about this one after reading various people's comparisons of the E4 line versus the E-mu Sound Card/Emulator X combination (old stuff = fatter, new stuff = could have been anybody's soft-sampler)

2) Why have all the Z-Plane filter implementations (to the best of my knowledge) after the Morpheus and UltraProteus been two dimensional response maps instead of three?

And then there are various side musings about stuff like: Just what are the technical limitations of the G and H chips? Could they be licensed from Creative/E-mu as the basis for a return of pro-level E-mu-esque instruments (even if E-mu themselves weren't allowed to make them because Creative are really anal about PC sound cards)? Could the E4 Ultra design be tweaked to take advantage of newer, faster core processors? Was it actually the DACs that gave us the "E-mu sound" rather than the H chip filters?

And finally: Just what has Dave Rossum been up to the last few years? How much of a hand does he even have anymore in E-mu? Will we ever see any more truely visionary products with the E-mu name on them?

See, I've been a fan of E-mu for almost 20 years now, and it just seems like they've really fallen off the radar the last few years. I know software has stolen the crown from hardware instruments lately, but you don't see Korg dropping the ball. Even Dave Smith and Bob Moog (may he rest in eternal happiness) kept bringing out new hardware gear, and they weren't exactly Korg/Yamaha/Roland scale business folks. Sure, Emulator X may be a nice product, but the reaction I've seen around here (and in several music gear magazines) has been pretty much "meh... just another bit of software". Where's the love gone?

You might be interested in this article: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Sep02/articles/emuanniversary.asp

A few years old now, but an interesting read none the less

Yeah, it was a great article. But I found it disturbing to learn that Creative bounced co-founder Scott Wedge the very morning after acquiring E-mu. That, to me, smacks of no-class.

And notice how the expected integration of the Emulator 5 software (later renamed Emulator X) with the Ultra units got dropped (which is really a shame, as it would have made a great software editor and remote for the Ultras). They didn't even keep the bank/preset format compatible with the E4 line.

Here's another interesting Sound-On-Sound article:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1995_articles/oct95/emuinterview.html

It's a bit old (late-'95), but I found the discussion of the Morpheus and the concepts behind the Z-Plane filters very interesting. It's part of what got me thinking about where E-mu could have gone with them. Obviously, CPU processing power has increased almost exponentially since then, so the problems they anticipated with CPU power and filter peak detection would be simpler to solve now. Which is why I couldn't understand why they would dumb-down the Z-Plane implementations in subsequent products (from a cube arrangement to just a square). Unless they just assumed that musicians were too dumb to handle three dimensional concepts (admittedly, the filter cube arrangement gave so much room to maneuver that most people seemed to just give up and stick with included presets rather than programming their own). They managed to get two of the three dimensions under real-time control by the time they abandoned the hardware route (EOS 4.7), but you could easily imagine that with today's processing power they could get all three dimensions of the cube arrangement variable in real-time.

Which brings me to the product I really think they should produce... a stand alone filter box for processing external audio through the three dimensional Z-Plane filter cubes, with real-time control and the complex patch-cord modulation stuff (Mmm... multi-function-generator... drool drool).