Fairlight-CMI

Hi Joe : thanks for the fascinating post :)

It has neither an IDC socket, or laptop style socket : it has some bare wires communing out of the back of the case (4 in total) which I assume are supposed to supply the power.(see photos)

Thanks,

Arron





--- In Fairlight-CMI@yahoogroups.com, Joe Sleator <joe.sleator@...> wrote:
>
> Hi Arron,
> 
> > so ive put it on ebay so everyone get a fair crack, at a price Id be
> willing to accept.
> 
> Well, it's tempting I can tell you.
> 
> The internal switchmode supplies in those may have been a bit under spec.
> Does your one have an IDC (mains kettle plug) connector on the back, or an
> external supply and a "laptop plug" for the power? One of the ones we used
> got the power through the breakout box, IIRC, I think at one point it was
> even supposed to work with the +/- 20 keyboard power. Nowadays they can
> happily run on a cheap $30 micro ATX supply, which fits neatly where the old
> 80's modular one did.
> 
> A bit of MFX 1 keyboard history. That one, or one of its production cousins
> maybe number 2 or 3 IIRC of the big MFX 1/2 keyboards with the breakout
> boxes sat on my desk for the second half of 1988 in Doody St Alexandria,
> where Fairlight moved initially from Boundary St in Rushcutter's Bay. I was
> lucky enough to get a chance to make some mischief with the 68000 firmware
> doing some "improvements" on MIDI CC messages being sent out of the MFX
> keyboard, and some early machine control and timecode (think tape) synch
> stuff. It didn't have proper sliders or bend wheels or anything, but they
> still wanted people to make music with it, rather than just score movies. At
> the time Fairlight was trying to replace the music keyboards with those, but
> that didn't last very long, people just liked the music keyboards too much,
> so they had to keep making them for a while longer until they finally
> stopped selling the music capability.
> 
> The other day I found my original linerprinter generated source code listing
> for it. 68000 code is very relaxing to look at. :-)
> 
> Anyway, in late 1988 Isao Tomita came to town to put on a sort of wild show
> which he called "Sound Cloud" in Farm Cove, complete with megawatt speakers
> and an aerial speaker hanging down from an Army Chinook helicopter as well,
> driven wirelessly. The amp and speaker were so big, that you could hear
> Tomita's music over the helicopter, from some angles at least when the wind
> and thermocline layers were right! I'm sure the chinook itself had some
> effect on the local temperature inversion, but the net effect was to make a
> sort of enormous weather generated room. In those days you couldn't use DSP
> to equalize a performance out for a room 5,000 x 5,000 x 1000 feet, so it
> just reverberated a lot.
> 
> Tomita himself was to be up in in a sort of ridiculous glass pyramid control
> room, suspended from a 200 foot industrial crane over the water. I'm
> wondering what the insurance on that setup looked like, not to mention the
> safety contingency plans. At least he didn't have it filled with pure
> oxygen!
> 
> More details here, paragraph 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isao_Tomita
> 
> Anyway, I heard about this gig, and decided to go, but the day of the gig,
> my desktop-firmware-writing MFX keyboard disappeared, so I couldn't work
> properly.
> 
> I rode my bike up to the gig, which was at night, and it was a bit surreal,
> as the weather was very blustery, and this really primal Tomita music, which
> I already loved, was coming over the water, sort of in waves due to a
> temperature inversion, and of course, there was this big helicopter trying
> to hover accurately. Anyway, I decided to climb a tree right about here:
> http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Farm+Cove,+Sydney,+New+South+Wales,+Australia&aq=0&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=53.829089,93.691406&ie=UTF8&hq=Farm+Cove&hnear=Farm+Cove,+Sydney+New+South+Wales+2000,+Australia&ll=-33.863641,151.218358&spn=0.003483,0.005718&t=h&z=18
> 
> I got fairly high up in the tree, and could see pretty well. The wind blew
> the tree around so it was heaving and swaying, and the sound bounced off
> everything and it was all pretty special and primal.
> 
> Next day I came in to work at Doody St, to find my old MFX firmware-writing
> box back in its place, all covered with greasy fingerprints. Apparently
> Tomita had used it in his control pyramid! Later Andrew Bell or perhaps Kim
> dropped round and explained how it had been taken off and used in the Tomita
> show to control some noises. At the time I remember wondering why anybody
> would want to use it to control a sampler. To this day I don't know exactly
> how, or if it was used.
> 
> I think I was also a bit miffed he hadn't autographed the thing!
> 
> So, I'm not saying that Arron's keyboard is the same one, but it's certainly
> similar. Happy bidding!
> 
> Joe
> 
> On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 10:16 AM, arroncx <aclague@...>wrote:
> 
> >
> >
> > OK : I never expected that multiple people would be interested, so ive put
> > it on ebay so everyone get a fair crack, at a price Id be willing to accept.
> >
> >
> > http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260745984351#ht_500wt_951
> >
> > Its just a 24 hour auction, and Ill post it out at the weekend.
> >
> > Hope this is fair to everyone,
> >
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Arron
> >
> > --- In Fairlight-CMI@yahoogroups.com, "linear226.excite" <linear226@>
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > Thanks Arron,
> > >
> > > yes be interested to see what it looks like,
> > >
> > > cheers Tony
> > >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: "arroncx" [aclague@]
> > > Date: 03/01/2011 11:40 AM
> > > To: Fairlight-CMI@yahoogroups.com
> > > Subject: [Fairlight-CMI] Re: Fairlight Series 3 spares wanted
> > >
> > > Note: Original message sent as attachment
> > > HI there : I have what I think is an MFX2 Controller : I picked it up
> > with some other fairlight spares I bought, but will never get round to using
> > it. It has just trailing bare wires instead of a proper cable, and from
> > others comments, appears to be a test/demo unit, supplied with a breakout
> > box to connect to series III without MFX backplane cards.
> > >
> > > As I said, I will never use this, I dont know if it works (never tried).
> > I would be happy to see it go to a good home and be useful. to someone. Ill
> > post some pictures tonight and let me know if you are interested.
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > >
> > > Arron
> > >
> > > --- In Fairlight-CMI@yahoogroups.com, "linear226.excite" <linear226@>
> > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Hi all,
> > > >
> > > > Anyone got any Series 3 spares knocking about? Might be looking for CMI
> > music kbd, Series 3 qwerty kbd with graphics tablet, MFX2 controller,
> > Waveform Supervisor card etc, or any other major components, I just picked
> > up an MFX2 rackmount tower configured as MFX3+ and looking to swap it out as
> > a Series 3/MFX2 configuration running 11.39. I'll be looking to shift the
> > existing cards if anyones interested, such as Waveform Executive card and
> > related I/O. Specs to follow. PS. I'm not looking to spend silly money, I
> > did allthat in the 90's...Thanks in advance.
> > > >
> > > > Tony
> > > >
> > >
> >
> >  
> >
>