Here comes the new bass same as the old bass.
In the beginning was the 1981 Emulator which was cheaper than the Fairlight, but eventually too expensive against the AKAI. So in 1990 came the Proteus series, essentially the Emulator disc library divided into instantly loading small racks – which at the time was pretty damn nifty. Acquired by Creative Labs in ’93, the company tried to maintain a technical point of difference with ever cheaper Japanese samplers. Which led to the Morpheus and 1994’s UltraProteus, featuring modular patching and Z-Plane filters among other oddities. It’s likely these proved too complex for the Average Enthusiast, and a rethink led to the Audity 2000 series, named after E-Mu’s first commercial synthesiser of 1980.
The original Audity.
Sales = 0.
As with the original Proteus the Audity series share an identical hardware base with swappable face plates and ROM sets – e.g. the Mo’Phatt and an Extreme Lead can be made into each other just by adding the relevant ROMs into four slots. The Proteus 2000 is the general composition version with samples drawn from across the entire library. I almost bought one with all four ROM slots filled but was outbid at the last second. Bastard. (As a side note, these E-Mu ROMs are now worth more than the racks as owners try for complete sets. One company in America is producing clones, but they remain expensive.)
The main changes from the Morpheus/UltraProteus are a smaller number of filter types (the UP has 288 – many are specific to uncommon uses), a set of four controllers on the front of the rack, four layers of sound (up from two) and the removal of the Function Generators. You can visualise the set up from the Prodatum open source editor.
These retreats are a bit sad, but to be honest the Proteus 2000 has a more efficient work flow – in stacking up four of the 50 kinds of filter to make hybrids – and the knobs on the front give you twelve assignable tweaks both there and over MIDI. The display is still very rudimentary, but nowhere near as primitive as the Ultra. Alongside pianos and bassoons you will never use in a piece of music there’s a useful collection of raw waveforms. No cross modulation, but LFOs and envelopes. It’s also able to be a master for other MIDI instruments, with extra MIDI ports and multiple audio in/outs on the back. This all eventually led to the Proteus 2500 and Command Stations that were the groove boxes of their time. Then death – not because of Creative Labs, who supported them for years. The Japanese just outdid them.
If you have any interest in this era of synthesis and have a PC computer you would probably be better off looking at the software version. This is just my acquisitiveness at work.