| Notes | Furse and Creative Strategies next project was the Qasar M8 or “Multimode 8”. Completed in 1975, the M8 was a $15,000, 8Bit, 4k memory, 8 voice polyphonic Digital Synthesiser based around the same dual 6800 1mhz Motorola processor and wire-wrapped board combination as the Qasar II. Uniquely the M8 allowed the synthesis of sounds using additive Fast Fourier Synthesis (FFT) drawn and edited with a light pen on a black and white VDU. The instrument was housed in a large box and played manually via a four octave keyboard or digitally using Furse’s innovative MUSEQ 8 ‘sequence playing system’ . Sound programmes could be saved to an 8″ floppy drive.
Later Models included the 8-voice MC6800 and Qasar Polyphone (1975).
In 1976 fellow Australian electronic instrument designers, Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel, approached Furse with an offer to license the M8 to their Fairlight company. This became Fairlight’s first production instrument the Qasar M8 CMI and the direct ancestor of the famous Fairlight CMI. The M8 CMI was an even more expensive $20,000 redesigned version of the dual CPU 6800 processor but with printed circuit boards, a new QDOS OS ( based on Motorola DOS), 8 voice polyphony all controlled by a more dynamic six octave keyboard and the same light pen control as the earlier M8.
The large and expensive Qasar M8 CMI was eventually discontinued in 1979, many of the features of the M8 being incorporated into the Fairlight CMI digital synthesiser/sampler. |
