The world of electronic music instruments suffers the lack of news since months - as you probably noticed in this blog, too. Leading synth blogs are switching to retro mode, showing vintage gear mostly, with explanations and in-action videos.

Retro Thing - a blog that is not dedicated to musical instruments exclusively - apparently started a blogpost wave with publishing an article of the world's first music system based on cheap home computers: Muzix81. This product family was the sensation of the early 80s, in a time just around the birth of the MIDI standard.

The idea came from Hungary: two brothers, Andras and Alex Szalay, playing in the same progrock band, Pantha Rhei - physicists by profession - had the thought of using these cheap gadgets in the process of making music.

The chosen platform was the British Sinclair's ZX81 - a microcomputer that seems so ugly that we had to applause every time it boots up with success. But the Szalays made it a wonder machine: a box, attached to the computer called Muzix81 Composer interfaced it with CV/Gate signals to most analogue synthesizers, while a smart sequencing software (mainly written in Basic) has driven them. It has no competitor at the time - sequencing solutions were installed only on dedicated platforms, we are way ahead of the very first common software systems.

The product got a valuable help from Janos Kobor, singer of Omega, a Hungarian space-rock band that was widely popular all over Europe, selling millions of albums. Omega set up a small isle of capitalism in the socialist Hungary, having western publishing contracts, privately-owned studio and sound reinforcement. They helped to organise manufacturing the hardware, and marketing the system worldwide.

The first edition of Muzix81 even didn't came with MIDI - the agreements around the standard came months later. But the brothers quickly adapted it with a software modification, using the Gate signal in-out. Another important development was porting the full system to ZX81's successor, ZX Spectrum, a computer that is more advanced and much more reliable.

But Composer was only the beginning: true sensation came soon, calling Audio Processor. In our pictures you can see this unit which came directly from my vault. It was world's first software sampler which outperformed all the leading sampling products in some ways. Just to remember: the top of all lines was Fairlight's system then, costing 200,000 USD, and a price revolution has just started with E-mu's first Emulator, at a price tag of 20,000 USD. Audio Processor was much cheaper, the full system came under 1,000 USD. While it was only monophonic, the audio quality on the output was slightly better than the competitors, thanks to a tricky logarhytmic D/A conversion which was new then. Features are also gone among the big ones, only the reliability of the computer was questionable.

The brand wasn't succeeded in reaching a stable market position because of some factors. At first, sales of the Sinclair platform started to fall soon, and Commodore 64, a computer with serious advancements, and a more robust and reliable performance invaded the shops and the homes. It quickly became the exclusive music platform also, thanks to Karl Steinberg, father of Cubase who basicly copied the Muzix81 Composer architecture, and reached a real market dominance in the next few years.

Second, since Hungary was a socialist country, reaching a real market success was almost impossible because of the rules, laws and the state of the economy system. (Only Rubik did it, with extreme-sized luck.)

One of the creators, Andras started a music business career with his next product, world's fastest guitar-MIDI converter which had an even complicated story - with a happy end: it is called Axon now, and you can still buy it from Terratec. He also worked for Akai Professional a lot, writing effect plugin software.