Fairlight CMI Series III - Formerly owned by Jane Child

I purchased this unit in 2019 from Backstage Auction's “All Access David Frangioni Collection". David Fragioni is best known as the CEO of Modern Drummer and as an engineer for Aerosmith. This was formerly owned and used by Jane Child and presumed to have been featured on her chart topping hit "Don't Want To Fall In Love" in addition to several of her music videos and promotions photos.

When I purchased the unit it did not work at all as it was missing it's hard drive and all discs. Mike of Mystery Circuits in Chapel Hill restored the unit to it's formerly glory after painstakingly removed both drives and used the space to mount the SCSI2SD drive and USB2CMI circuit. He then cut a small square of tinted plexiglass to fill in the space. All sound libraries are accessible via the SD drive. He mounted all of the new jacks on a blank panel on the back of the Fairlight and also made some new cables to connect the keyboard, and a DB25 to XLR breakout for the main mix output. Other work included new filter capacitors for the analog power supply, rework on some of the channel cards, new Lithium battery, new foam filters, and new SCSI cables. The unit still has some issues with certain preset sound sets (About 25% of the Series III presets- a corrupt garbled digital sound) as with the sampling as well. This will need further diagnosis and being sold As-Is with the understanding this will need further repair work.

Unit is missing its original alphanumeric keyboard.

This will be extremely costly to ship. Please budget out at least $3,500 for a white glove transport company with proper insurance. It may even be more. I am about an hour and a half from New York City, pickup is preferred.

As a side note: It appears this was originally auctioned off sometime around 2006 (according to Matrixsynth) and some of the hard cases do mention M.S.P. (Maximum Sequential Potential) on them, which was Ned Liben's studio in NYC. Liben was "EBN" of the 80's synth duo EBN/OZN. Who I believe may have originally let Jane use the Fairlight to record her album then either sold her the unit or helped mediate her purchase as he apparently was a Fairlight sales rep. Ned also had a Fairlight programmer credit on Scritti Politti’s Cupid + Psyche ’85 which this may or may not have then also been on that recording. Needless to say this unit has a lot of history!