The Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument) shipped in 1979 and its Series II, introduced in 1982, is the version most often cited as the machine that made digital sampling a performable instrument rather than a studio curiosity. Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie built it in Sydney out of research into digital synthesis; by the early 1980s it was showing up on records by Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, and Stevie Wonder, largely because it was one of the only machines in the world that could do what it did — load a real-world sound, pitch it across a keyboard, and sequence it with its own graphic editor, Page R.
It’s also, four-plus decades on, a genuinely difficult machine to keep alive. There’s no manufacturer support line, parts are whatever survived, and the documentation that exists is scattered across forums, old service manuals, and the memories of the small number of people who worked on these machines when they were new.
100 Things I Do, a YouTube restoration channel, spent five episodes on exactly that problem with a Fairlight CMI IIx described going in as “very broken.” The series — Part 1 through the closing Part 5: The Final — documents the process in full: diagnosing which of the machine’s many custom cards had failed, sourcing or repairing replacements, and the research needed to confirm each fix against a machine with no current factory support. The final episode credits David Morley and Peter Wielk — Wielk a former Fairlight studio manager who has spent years helping restore and resell CMIs worldwide — for help along the way, underscoring how much of this kind of repair work runs on a small surviving network of people who actually knew the hardware when it was in production.
What makes the series worth watching isn’t just the repair itself — it’s a demonstration of what keeping 1980s computer-synthesizer hybrids running actually requires now: not a schematic and a soldering iron alone, but tracking down the right people, cross-referencing conflicting information, and treating the machine’s quirks as something to understand rather than route around.
Related Reading
- A Very Broken Fairlight - Fairlight CMI Restoration Part 5 The Final — 100 Things I Do (YouTube)
- A very broken Fairlight CMI IIX Restoration Part 1 — 100 Things I Do (YouTube)
- Restoring A Very Broken Fairlight CMI IIx Synth Workstation — Synthtopia
- Fairlight CMI Restoration — Sonic State
- Fairlight CMI — Wikipedia