Vangelis' First Yamaha Becomes Most Expensive Synthesizer Ever Sold at $534,000

A Yamaha CS-80 listed on Reverb and claimed to be Vangelis’s very first has sold for £401,465.62, or roughly $534,000, setting a new record as the most expensive synthesizer sale in history.Ad 0:00 Click for sound 0:00 / 0:00 The listing was posted on the gear marketplace Reverb by an Athens-based seller who identified the instrument as the CS-80 heard on Vangelis’s 1977 album Spiral, the record that marked the legendary Greek composer’s first use of what would become his signature synthesizer.

The seller described the unit as an early prototype with no serial number, fully functional and accompanied by its original stand and lid, with only one cosmetic blemish: a cigarette burn on the “top A key.” The connection to Vangelis rests entirely on the seller’s word, though the Athens origin and that telltale burn mark lend the claim at least a surface plausibility, given the composer’s well-known smoking habit.“This is Vangelis’ very first Yamaha CS-80,” wrote the seller, ‘Synthesizerman,’ who did not include documentation to confirm the synth’s provenance.

“This is the real deal.Early prototype no serial number.

It can demolish a whole block of flats.This is the ‘Spiral’ CS-80, historic.

Priced accordingly.” In a 1984 interview with Electronics & Music Maker, Vangelis described the CS-80 as “the most important synthesizer in my career” and “for me the best analogue synthesizer design there has ever been.” A standard CS-80 in working condition routinely fetches tens of thousands of dollars on the secondhand market.Whether or not this particular instrument passed through his hands, the CS-80’s place in his story is not in dispute.

He first incorporated the synthesizer on Spiral and went on to deploy it across Chariots of Fire, Opera Sauvage and the seminal Blade Runner score, where its polyphonic aftertouch and ribbon-controlled pitch bend ga...