A Caltech engineer and a box of little boxes.

M-Audio was founded by Tim Ryan, an engineer who graduated from the California Institute of Technology. In a 2002 interview with Sound On Sound, Ryan said his mother was a concert pianist but that he never became a musician himself, and instead applied “science, maths and engineering know-how to music.” Around 1977 he and his room-mates built the Con Brio Advanced Digital Synthesizer, an 800-chip, 64-oscillator instrument that cost $30,000; he said they built three and sold one, which ended up in Chick Corea’s studio.

Ryan then wrote software for Commodore and Apple computers, including MIDI software for Sequential Circuits, and helped design the Studio One and Studio Two sequencers. “In 1988 I started a company which was originally called Music Soft, but Yamaha had a claim on that name, so we changed to Midiman,” he told Sound On Sound. M-Audio’s own website gives the same founding year: “M-Audio was founded in 1988 under the name of Midiman.”

The company soon moved from software to hardware. “In 1990, we switched to making hardware and our first product was a MIDI-to-tape device called the Midiman,” Ryan said. It did not reach the mainstream, but the Syncman and Syncman Pro sync boxes did, followed by MIDI interfaces such as the Midisport, which Ryan said sold “about 10 times more than the sync boxes.” “We became known as the ‘little box’ company,” he recalled. By 2002 the company’s mailing address, on its archived website, was in Arcadia, California.

From Midiman to M-Audio.

In the late 1990s Midiman moved into digital audio, with converters, patchbays and its first audio interfaces, which Sound On Sound reviewed in 1998. In 2000, with the Delta series of PCI soundcards, the company introduced “M-Audio” as the name for its audio products, according to Sound On Sound and M-Audio’s own history. Ryan told the magazine in 2002 that the firm had about 80 percent of the US music soundcard business, that it grew 128 percent in 2000 and 68 percent the following year, and that it was the fastest-growing music company in the US two years running; these are his claims.

The same period brought distribution deals. Ryan said the company distributed Propellerhead’s Reason, Ableton and the VJ software maker Arkaos in the US and the UK. In 2002 it entered two new categories: studio monitors, with the Studiophile SP5B, and keyboard controllers, with the 25-key Oxygen8, both reviewed by Sound On Sound that year. M-Audio’s website says the Oxygen established “the important new category of portable keyboard controller.” Mix reported in July 2002 that Midiman had adopted M-Audio as its corporate identity.

In 2003 the company bought Evolution Electronics, a maker of MIDI controllers, Mix reported. Then came a change of ownership. In October 2004 Mix reported that Avid Technology had agreed to acquire Midiman Inc., doing business as M-Audio, for about $80 million in cash, some 2 million Avid shares and the assumption of its stock options; English Wikipedia, citing The Music Trades, puts the total at about $174 million. M-Audio became part of Avid’s Digidesign audio division, with Ryan staying on as general manager. Avid’s chief executive, David Krall, said: “we’re bolstering our investment in the home studio market segment.”

Controllers and the computer studio.

A controller keyboard makes no sound of its own: it sends MIDI, the standard that lets instruments and computers talk to one another. Dave Smith demonstrated it at the Winter NAMM Show in 1983, and the specification was published that August, English Wikipedia says. A newer extension, MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE), which lets each note in a chord be shaped separately, was adopted by the MIDI Manufacturers Association in January 2018.

Two makers here share an owner. Akai Professional and M-Audio belong to inMusic, the private group in Cumberland, Rhode Island. Jack O’Donnell, its founder, bought Akai Professional in 2004 or 2005 — sources differ — and inMusic took over M-Audio, founded in 1988 as Midiman, from Avid in July 2012.

The others are smaller. Nektar Technology is “California-based,” Sound On Sound wrote in 2019; the company dates itself to 2009. Keith McMillen Instruments, of Berkeley, California, announced in September 2024 that it was rebranding as Muse Kinetics. ROLI, maker of the Seaboard, is London-based; after its original company entered administration in 2021, a new company took over the brand, English Wikipedia says.

Two are European. Expressive E calls itself a French company founded in 2013, and its legal notice gives a registered office in Marseille. Studiologic is a brand of Fatar, the keyboard-mechanism maker founded in Recanati, in Italy’s Marche, in 1956; Fatar says it has factories in Recanati and in Tunisia.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Avid to inMusic.

Under Avid, M-Audio hardware gained a version of Pro Tools, called Pro Tools M-Powered, English Wikipedia says. New products included the Trigger Finger, a USB pad controller with a 4×4 grid of sixteen pads, announced in 2005, and the Black Box guitar processor, which Mix reported M-Audio had developed with Roger Linn Design — the company of the engineer behind the Akai Professional MPC. The keyboard range grew into the Oxygen, Keystation and Axiom lines.

In July 2012 Avid sold the brand. Its press release, published by MusicRadar on 2 July 2012, said its consumer audio products were going to inMusic, “the parent company of Akai Professional, Alesis and Numark,” including M-Audio keyboards, controllers, interfaces, speakers and digital DJ equipment, while Avid kept Pro Tools and the Mbox and Fast Track interfaces. Avid sold its consumer video line to Corel at the same time and estimated the proceeds of the two sales together at about $17 million. English Wikipedia says inMusic also took on Avid’s AIR software group.

Today M-Audio is one of inMusic’s brands, alongside Akai Professional, Numark and Moog, and the group is based in Cumberland, Rhode Island. M-Audio’s website lists MIDI interfaces, keyboard controllers, monitors, headphones and microphones. Neither its own pages nor inMusic’s, as we read them, say where its hardware is made, so we make no claim about it.

For a design guide, M-Audio shows how a brand can grow from small, practical boxes into a full range while keeping its focus on the computer musician, through three owners. Compare Novation, another maker of keyboard controllers, and Numark, its inMusic stablemate. For this guide we use a deep teal with black and cyan and a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep M-Audio’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.