among producers and professional recording studios, and it competed in this market with other high-end production systems, such as the Fairlight CMI. Though scarce, the Synclavier remains in use in many studios to this day. Fairlight Instruments Fairlight Instruments was started in Sydney, in 1975 by Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie. The company was originally established as a manufacturer and retailer of video special effects equipment. The Fairlight CMI or Computer Music Instrument, released in 1979, started life as the Qasar M8. The M8 was handwired and legend has it that it took two hours to boot up. The CMI was the first commercially available polyphonic digital sampling instrument. The original Fairlight CMI sampled using a resolution of 8 bits per sample, at a rate of 24 kHz, and used two 8-bit Motorola 6800 processors (later upgraded to the more powerful 16/32-bit Motorola 68000). It was equipped with two six-octave keyboards, an alphanumeric keyboard, and an interactive video display unit (VDU) where soundwaves could be edited or even drawn from scratch using a light pen. Software allowed for editing, looping, and mixing of sounds which could then be played back via the keyboard or the software-based sequencer. It retailed for around US$25,000. Fairlight later released the Series IIx, which increased the sampling rate to 32 kHz and was the first to feature basic MIDI functionality. In 1985, the Series III was released with two significant upgrades: bit rate and sampling rate were increased to CD quality (16 bit/44.1 kHz) and SMPTE time code was now supported. Notable users of the Fairlight CMI include Peter Gabriel, Herbie Hancock, Trevor Horn, Art of Noise, Yello, Pet Shop Boys, Jean Michel Jarre, Duran Duran and Kate Bush. Horn, considered the "Man who invented the eighties", first used his well-known sampling techniques on the album Adventures in Modern Recording, the second studio album released under the name of his project The Buggles. Saying that he was "quite fascinated by Fairlight brass and all of those kind of things that Geoffrey and I had started messing around with before he went off to join Asia", the sampling techniques on Adventures would later be used for records Horn produced like Slave to the Rhythm by Grace Jones, Art of Noise's The Seduction of Claude Debussy and Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Welcome to the Pleasuredome. E-mu Systems E-mu Emulator (1981) was E-mu Systems' initial foray into sampling,