Founded in 1971 as a synthesizer maker, E-mu was a pioneer in samplers, sample-based drum machines and low-cost digital sampling music workstations.

[1] E-mu Systems was founded in Santa Cruz, California by Dave Rossum, a UCSC student and two of his friends from Caltech, Steve Gabriel and Jim Ketcham, with the goal to build their own modular synthesizers.

In 1996, E-mu attempted to break into the digital multi-track market with the Darwin 8-track hard disk recording system.

[9] Meanwhile, E-mu continued to develop electronic musical instruments, and in 1996, began introducing another series of 32-voice polyphonic, 16-part multitimbral sound modules along the lines of the Proteus series, each loaded with preset sounds designed for a specific music genre, and packaged in a 1-space rackmount unit.

[11][12] In 1998, E-mu was combined with Ensoniq, another synthesizer and sampler manufacturer previously acquired by Creative Technology.

While a PCI card is used for audio input and output, the algorithms no longer run on dedicated hardware but in software on the PC.

Notably, the cards and drivers entirely omit internal 'wavetable' sample-based MIDI synthesis, Creative's proprietary EAX sound routines and basically anything commonly associated with the parent company.

Although the cards were rushed into market and originally came bundled with fairly raw drivers (which have subsequently received periodical major improvements and even additions beyond the advertised specifications), they have generally met with rather favourable reviews.