Electronic Music Laboratories

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Electronic Music Laboratories, commonly abbreviated to EML, was a synthesizer company founded in 1968 in Vernon, Connecticut, by four engineers. It manufactured and designed a variety of synthesizers sharing the same basic design but configured in different ways.

The company originated by accident, after Dale Blake, Norman Millard, Dennis Daugherty, and Jeff Murray, employees of Gerber Scientific, founded the company in order to ensure that they all continued to have a job following an impending layoff. Following the schematics of a fellow audio engineer, Fred Locke, the four made synthesizers that directly competed with those of Moog Music and ARP. Although their synthesizers were not as sophisticated or capable as those designed by Bob Moog or Alan R. Pearlman, they were marketed as being much more reliable, which was true due to their use of op-amps instead of transistors.

The company's original EML-200 was designed in part for Connecticut's "Pilot Electronic Project" or "Project PEP" as an educational tool for secondary school students.^[1] The program was created by then State Music Consultant Lloyd Schmidt.^[2][3]

Although the company stopped manufacturing synthesizers in 1976, following the departure of two of their employees, the company continued to operate until 1984, designing and manufacturing products for others and repairing their synthesizers.