through a pair of cheap and cheerful $150 Dayton loudspeakers, the kind you can pick up from any big-box store.
“DEQX does to audio quality and resolution what high-definition, and now 4K, have done to TV,” he says.National Film and Sound Archive. Not that he is a stranger to turning the music world on its head. Ryrie and his schoolfriend Peter Vogel, an electronics designer, invented the world’s first digital sampling synthesiser, the Fairlight CMI , launched in 1979. In doing so, the two Sydneysiders forever changed the way music was made, totally altering what we listened to from the 1980s on.
Regardless, the Fairlight CMI was born: big, clunky and, by today’s standards, primitive looking, with keyboard, floppy disks, a monster computer processor, a green-screen monitor and an interactive light pen.. But it wasn’t long before a who’s who of the world’s biggest recording artists were lining up to use it: early adopters Peter Gabriel, Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock, as well as Kate Bush, Alan Parsons, Thomas Dolby and Joni Mitchell.
Unfortunately, the high-end Fairlight was again up against lower-cost competitors running on PCs and Apple Macs. “Sales were going through the roof, but I knew it wasn’t going to last,” Ryrie confesses.By the end of the decade, he was dividing his time between Fairlight and Lake Technology , which was playing around with virtual surround sound for headphones. While there, Ryrie wondered whether the audio processing technology could be adapted for loudspeakers.