Two schoolfriends and “the world’s greatest synthesizer.”

Fairlight began in Sydney. Kim Ryrie, who had founded the electronics magazine Electronics Today International and designed a build-it-yourself synthesizer for it, wanted to make something far more capable, and in 1975 asked his former classmate Peter Vogel to help build “the world’s greatest synthesizer” around the new microprocessor, English Wikipedia says. In December 1975 the two set up a home business. They named it Fairlight after a hydrofoil ferry that passed Ryrie’s grandmother’s house on Sydney Harbour; the Powerhouse Museum says the name was chosen because the ferry “represented the latest in technology.”

Their instrument grew out of someone else’s design. The Motorola consultant Tony Furse had built a digital synthesizer, the Qasar M8, using two Motorola 6800 processors and a light pen, working with the Canberra School of Electronic Music. Vogel and Ryrie licensed it and spent years turning it into the Fairlight CMI, short for Computer Musical Instrument. In 1978, English Wikipedia says, Vogel recorded about a second of piano from a radio broadcast and found that playing it back at different pitches sounded far more real than anything they could synthesise. The pair called the process sampling, and the CMI is widely credited with bringing the word into music.

The Series I appeared in 1979, with a music keyboard, a computer keyboard, a monitor with green-and-black graphics on which sounds could be drawn with a light pen, and 8-inch floppy disks. Its sampling was crude by later standards — 8-bit, with 16 kilobytes of memory per voice — but nothing else on sale did the same thing. The Powerhouse Museum credits the industrial design to KWA Design, and manufacture to Fairlight Instruments itself.

Peter Gabriel, Page R and the orchestra hit.

Fairlight’s British break came in the summer of 1979, when Vogel demonstrated the CMI at Peter Gabriel’s home while Gabriel was making his third solo album. Gabriel used it on the record and, with Stephen Paine, set up Syco Systems to sell the machine in Britain at £12,000, English Wikipedia says. Buyers there and in America included Kate Bush, Trevor Horn, Thomas Dolby, Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock and Jean-Michel Jarre. Britain’s Musicians’ Union called it a “lethal threat” to its members.

The Series II of 1982, priced at £30,000, added Page R, a graphic sequencer that let users build songs as patterns on the screen rather than by writing code; English Wikipedia credits it with helping to create the modern idea of music programming. Its factory sounds became part of 1980s pop, above all the orchestra hit preset “ORCH5.” The Series IIx of 1983 added MIDI, and the Series III of 1985 moved to 16-bit, 44.1 kHz sampling and swapped the light pen for a tablet and stylus after users complained of aching arms. A fully loaded Series III could cost about £112,000.

Cheaper machines caught up. E-mu’s Emulator, launched in 1981 at $7,900, and later samplers from Akai and computers such as the Atari ST undercut the CMI, and the company began to concentrate on post-production. The Powerhouse Museum says the original company “went under in 1989,” and that Ryrie bought back the patents and set up a new firm, Fairlight ESP; English Wikipedia dates its founding to April 1989, with backing from the Australian distributor Amber.

Design and documentation.

Digital sampling and synthesis reached recording studios in the late 1970s and 1980s. Fairlight, founded in Sydney in 1975 by Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, introduced its CMI in 1979; New England Digital, founded in Vermont in 1976 by Sydney Alonso and Cameron Jones, built the Synclavier; and Wolfgang Palm’s PPG, in Hamburg, introduced wavetable synthesis in 1979, English Wikipedia says.

American makers brought prices down. E-mu, whose name Dave Rossum coined in 1971 and which he and Scott Wedge formed as a partnership in 1972, moved from modular synthesizers to samplers; Ensoniq, of Malvern, Pennsylvania, launched its Mirage sampler in 1985 at $1,695; Kurzweil, founded in 1982, launched its K250 in 1984; and Alesis, formed in Hollywood by Keith Barr in 1984, Mix reported, launched the ADAT recorder in 1991.

Few stayed independent. PPG closed in 1987, and New England Digital in the early 1990s. Creative Technology of Singapore bought E-mu in 1993 and Ensoniq in 1998, and merged them. The Korean piano maker Young Chang bought Kurzweil in 1990; Hyundai Development Company bought Young Chang in 2006, and the group, renamed HDC Young Chang in 2018, is based in Incheon; Kurzweil’s own website names no parent company today.

Some names returned. Blackmagic Design, the Australian video company, bought Fairlight in 2016 and sells Fairlight consoles. Cameron Jones bought back the Synclavier trademark, and his Synclavier Digital released the Regen synthesizer in 2022. Jack O’Donnell bought Alesis in 2001; it belongs to his inMusic group of Cumberland, Rhode Island.

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 the CMI to the mixing console.

The later Fairlight was a post-production company. Its MFX workstations of the 1990s, the Dream Constellation console of 2004, the Xynergi controller of 2008, with keys that label themselves on small screens, and the Quantum consoles of 2012 and 2014 were built for television and film sound rather than for songwriting, according to English Wikipedia and reviews in Mix and AudioTechnology. In 2001 the company won a Scientific and Technical Academy Award for digital audio technology for the film industry, the Powerhouse Museum says.

The name also had a second life as an instrument. In 2009 Peter Vogel launched a separate company to build a 30th-anniversary CMI, the CMI-30A, under a licence of the Fairlight name, and in 2012 renamed it Peter Vogel Instruments after the trademark owner ended that licence. The Federal Court of Australia ruled in December 2015 that the licence had been validly ended; an appeal in 2016 succeeded only in part.

In September 2016, at the IBC trade show in Amsterdam, Blackmagic Design, the Melbourne maker of cameras and DaVinci Resolve software, announced that it had bought Fairlight, ProVideo Coalition reported. Since version 14 in 2017, DaVinci Resolve has included a Fairlight audio page, and Blackmagic sells Fairlight-branded consoles, desktop editors and audio interfaces; English Wikipedia says the software has been used on films including Logan. We did not find a statement of where the current hardware is assembled.

For a design guide, Fairlight shows how an interface — a green screen and a light pen — can become a brand’s image. Compare Synclavier, its high-end American rival, and E-mu, whose cheaper Emulator answered it. For this guide we use screen black, phosphor green and a harbour blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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