Tim Ryan is an American engineer,

inventor An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition, idea or process. An invention may be an improvement upon a machine, product, or process for increasing efficiency or lowering cost. It may also be an entirely new concept. If an ...

and entrepreneur who is best known for founding Midiman (later renamed M-Audio). As of 2004 he works with Avid Technology.

Early career

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 Alan may refer to: People *Alan (surname), an English and Turkish surname *Alan (given name), an English given name ** List of people with given name Alan ''Following are people commonly referred to solely by "Alan" or by a homonymous name.'' * ...

and

Don Lieberman Don, don or DON and variants may refer to: Places * County Donegal, Ireland, Chapman code DON *Don (river), a river in European Russia *Don River (disambiguation), several other rivers with the name * Don, Benin, a town in Benin *Don, Dang, a vi ...

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

synthesizer A synthesizer (also spelled synthesiser) is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis and ...

s, the 800-chip Con Brio, Inc. Advanced Digital Synthesizer (ADS), which utilized three 6502 processors, the same processor used in the

Apple II The Apple II (stylized as ) is an 8-bit home computer and one of the world's first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products. It was designed primarily by Steve Wozniak; Jerry Manock developed the design of Apple II's foam-m ...

computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...

and

Commodore 64 The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International (first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7–10, 1982, in Las Vegas). It has been listed in the Guinness ...

. 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 Armando Anthony "Chick" Corea (June 12, 1941 – February 9, 2021) was an American jazz composer, pianist, keyboardist, bandleader, and occasional percussionist. His compositions "Spain", " 500 Miles High", "La Fiesta", "Armando's Rhumba", and ...

. They ceased operations in 1982.

Software and hardware

Ryan then co-founded Third Street Software, a Commodore and Apple software development company that did contract software development for

Sequential Circuits Sequential is an American synthesizer company founded in 1974 as Sequential Circuits by Dave Smith. In 1978, Sequential released the Prophet-5, the first programmable polyphonic synthesizer; it became a market leader and industry standard, use ...

, Syntech, and Sonus, including the first multitimbral sequencing software for Sequential's 600-series synthesizer. Ryan then helped design two of the best-selling US sequencers of the time, the Studio One (for the Commodore) and Studio Two (for the Apple II). Having decided that he wanted to own his own company, he founded Midi Soft in 1988 and shortly thereafter renamed it Midiman, due to Yamaha already having rights to the Midi Soft name. Offering a variety of small, affordable MIDI problem solvers, sync devices, and interfaces, Midiman quickly established itself and later branched out into soundcards and audio interfaces, studio monitor speakers and MIDI keyboards, with the company's mission being "to increase virtualization, musical malleability, performance control and portability to an unprecedented level.""Dial M For Audio: Tim Ryan of M-Audio,"
Sound On Sound, Dec 2002 In 2002, Ryan was named the 2002 Los Angeles Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in the Media/Entertainment category. He was recognized for "founding and guiding a company that is currently one of the dominant suppliers in the computer-centric digital audio arena and one of the key players in the desktop recording revolution." In 2004, Avid Technology acquired Midiman, Inc. (at that time doing business as M-Audio) and kept Ryan on board with the company as general manager."Avid Adds M-Audio to Its Fold,"
Mix Magazine, Oct 2004

References

External links

Tim Ryan Interview
NAMM Oral History Library (2021) {{DEFAULTSORT:Ryan, Tim American inventors American audio engineers Computer hardware engineers California Institute of Technology alumni Living people Year of birth missing (living people)