Vince Clarke 1984 Audio Recording with Fairlight CMI

"Very rare tape recording of Vince using the Fairlight Computer back in 1984.

This is an audio recording that was done for Electronic Soundmaker and Computer Music magazine. I found the original magazine and tape in my loft. I thought you'd like to here it so I've converted it into a digital format. Now go make a cup of tea or get a beer, sit back and enjoy this blast from the past."

[via Matrixsynth and Bonnline on YouTube]

First Look at the New Fairlight

[via Matrixsynth]

FAIRLIGHT CMI iPad App FIRST LOOK | NAMM 2011 | ProAudioStar.com

While the new Fairlight CMI's seems a bit silly and overpriced to me, THIS I can get behind.

Demos of the New Fairlight

Fairlight CMI demonstrated by Greg Sneddon

Demo of the Fairlight CMI from an Australian television show from the 80's. Posted on YouTube via psvbluemts.

The Return of the Fairlight?

Via Failedmuso:

Any electronic musician who was around in the 80's is undoubtedly aware of the Fairlight CMI. Along with the New England Digital Synclavier, it was the premier sampling workstation back in the day and carried a price tag to boot - so much so that owning a Fairlight became a status symbol of sorts. You knew that if a musician had one of these in their studio that they were selling a hell of a lot of records. As sampling technology became cheaper however, the Fairlight CMI died out since these new machines could do much more than the Fairlight for a fraction of the cost.

Imagine the surprise, then, when a few days ago Fairlight founder Peter Vogel made a posting on the Fairlight CMI Yahoo Group thinking aloud about the possibility of a computer-based Fairlight IV:

"There have been discussions from time to time about replicating the CMI using a software emulation. These efforts will have limited success because the "Fairlight sound" relies on the peculiarities of the hardware used in the original design.

In the days when I was the designing CMI hardware, my greatest challenge was to minimise the distortions and artifacts that were inherent aspects of the hardware available at that time. In effect, we struggled to make the Fairlight sound less "Fairlight". So the intimate details of what makes a Fairlight sound like a Fairlight are indelibly etched in my brain.

When Fairlight brought out the Crystal Core Engine last year, my imagination ran wild. Here was a tiny board with enormous capabilities that could be configured to faithfully reproduce the CMI hardware in its FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). Every bit of the 1980's CMI hardware, the essence of its sound, could be reconstructed faithfully in digital hardware form.

...

I also recently discovered that ALL the IP relating to the original Fairlight CMI including all of the hardware and filter designs, sample libraries etc are still retained by Fairlight.au in Sydney.

So I have been wondering if it would be worthwhile to develop a faithful reproduction of the CMI on the "Virtual Hardware" of the CC-1?

This would perform identically to the original CMI series II or III, but run on a PC fitted with the Crystal Core card. The MIDI input would come directly into the CC-1 so there would be no problem of latency introduced by the PC.

At this stage I'd like to "feel out" the market to assess the level of interest in this project and whether the significant investment in R&D will be worthwhile.

The Fairlight Series IV (CC-1, I/O box and software) might be sold for approximately $US5,000.00.

So my question is, what do you think of this idea? How would a Fairlight CMI at this sort of price be received by the market? Who would the buyers be and how would I tap into them?

What do you think?

Peter Vogel"

My personal thought is that he must be out of his mind to think people are going to pay $5000 for a software sampler on a card hybrid in this day and age (especially with the possibility of a global recession looming...). You can pick up decent hardware samplers on Ebay now for a few hundred bucks... about the same as the high end software samplers. It would really have to bring something ground breaking and extraordinary to the table to fetch this kind of price and just the 'Fairlight sound' isn't going to do it. Am I being overly critical or does this just seem like a crazy idea?