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| - (1950?-) Co-founder, along with Dave Rossum, of E-mu Systems. The two both grew up in the San Francisco Bay area in the USA. They were acquainted in high school, where Rossum was two years ahead on account of being older. After graduating high school, Wedge went to the University of California - Santa Cruz, where he met Rossum again in 1971, just as Rossum and some friends were starting an effort to build their own synthesizer. Wedge and Rossum co-founded E-mu in 1972, and sold their first few E-mu 25 models that year.
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| abstract
| - (1950?-) Co-founder, along with Dave Rossum, of E-mu Systems. The two both grew up in the San Francisco Bay area in the USA. They were acquainted in high school, where Rossum was two years ahead on account of being older. After graduating high school, Wedge went to the University of California - Santa Cruz, where he met Rossum again in 1971, just as Rossum and some friends were starting an effort to build their own synthesizer. Wedge and Rossum co-founded E-mu in 1972, and sold their first few E-mu 25 models that year. While Rossum became the hard-core circuit designer, Wedge became the expert on synth features and usability. He guided E-mu in determining what features the company's modular synths should have, and how panels should be laid out. He worked with the company's customers in planning improvements and future products. And as E-mu started to add some digital features to its modulars in the late 1970s, he became the company's expert on digital circuits and microprocessor programming. Wedge's digital expertise took front and center in the development of the Audity, the company's first attempt at a high-end polyphonic synth. However, the Audity would have been a very expensive model, and after the company failed to receive any orders at its introduction in 1980, they cancelled the Audity product. They instead turned to development of the Emulator, and here Wedge's role was crucial in developing the software for the company's first digital synth. During this period, the company had incorporated and the two founders had decided that Wedge would be E-mu's president and CEO. E-mu grew rapidly in the 1980s in the wake of the Emulator's success, and as this occurred, Wedge transitioned out of engineering and into management full time. He built a management team that succeeded in marketing and guiding the development of popular products through the 1980s. Wedge left E-mu after the company's acquisition by Creative Technologies in 1993. He had voted for the acquisition to financially stabilize the company, even though he knew that it would be the end of his role, and the end of his partnership with Rossum. Since then, he has been, in his words, "gainfully unemployed", mostly remaining out of the public eye, and having no further involvement in the music industry. He works as a management consultant, and has done some work in aircraft avionics.
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