Tim Ryan (engineer)

Tim Ryan
Known for	founding M-Audio

Tim Ryan is an American engineer, inventor and entrepreneur who is best known for founding Midiman (later renamed M-Audio). As of 2004 he works with Avid Technology.

Ryan grew up the son of a concert pianist and developed a love of music from an early age, but he did not become a musician himself. While working toward a Bachelor of Arts degree at the California Institute of Technology, he excelled at science, math, and engineering, and decided to apply those skills to his love of music. According to Ryan, in 1977 he and two fellow Caltech students Alan Danziger and Don Lieberman were looking at some of E-mu Systems products selling for about $400, and thought that, considering the wholesale cost of the electronic parts involved was about $15, they could produce a similar product and sell it for half the price.

What the students ended up designing instead was one of the first digital synthesizers, the 800-chip Con Brio, Inc. Advanced Digital Synthesizer (ADS), which utilized three 6502 processors, the same processor used in the Apple II computer and Commodore 64. The ADS offered an advanced feature set for its time: 64 oscillators which could be both amplitude- and frequency-modulated, split keyboard capability, 16-stage envelopes, layering and modulation, and multiple digital-to-analog converters. The resulting unit cost $30,000, but there was very little market for this kind of synthesizer. Con Brio produced three different examples of the ADS, but only sold one, which was used on some major studio film scores and then owned by Chick Corea. They ceased operations in 1982.

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