Mike Lynch in happier times -- a truly sad loss to the technology world and his surviving family.Photo: Henry Nicholls/Reuters
They called him the “British Bill Gates” but to SOUND ON SOUND readers, of course, he was much more than that! Now that Dr Mike Lynch OBE’s body has tragically been formally identified, it is time for SOS to look at his pioneering achievements in musical instrument design, before he rose to such a lofty position in the wider tech world as CEO of his Cambridge-based company, Autonomy.
by Paul Wiffen
Mike was born in Ilford, East London, to Irish immigrant parents and grew up near Chelmsford, Essex (his father was a firefighter in the town and his mother a trauma nurse in nearby Billericay) but his name will be forever linked with Cambridge where he obtained his PhD at Christ’s College [part of Cambridge University], did much of his early teaching and research (at the St John’s Innovation Centre with his first company Cambridge Neurodynamics and where he later built the corporate HQ for his huge Autonomy company, before selling out to the US computer behemoth H-P for $10.2 billion and becoming the UK's first 'tech billionaire'.
At 11, Mike won a scholarship to Bancroft’s School, Woodford (he would later become Lead Patron of Bancroft’s Foundation as he always believed in paying back). Whilst there he won a place at Christ’s College to study Natural Sciences and then stayed on to do a PhD in artificial neural networks, from which most of his later successes flowed naturally. His thesis was entitled Adaptive Techniques In Signal Processing And Connectionist Models. He then went on to accept a Research Fellowship on adaptive pattern recognition and continued his love affair with Bayesian mathematics and analysis [he even named his ill-fated superyacht Bayesian].
Mike had a lifelong passion for Clarinet and is seen here playing in his school jazz band.
Lynex Sampler
But Academia was too small a pond for Mike Lynch’s vision. In 1987, he wrote a proposal for a 16-bit sampler he called Lynex (acknowledging the designer’s use of the highly popular Atari ST computer as a front-end and MIDI interface, using its DMA [Direct Memory Access] connector). This crossed the desk of Nando Fabi, managing director of Italian organ distributors Elka-Orla (UK) Ltd, who was looking for a high tech product to help replace the reducing business in electronic organs.
Lynett Systems LYNEX SAMPLER processor with Atari 1040ST.Photo: Mark EwingThey signed a development deal with Mike’s first company Lynett Systems and his son Fausto Fabi flew with Mike to the 1987 Summer NAMM show in Chicago to have preliminary meetings about distribution and development. Fausto took Mike to see the Oberheim DPX-1 launch as it was a rackmount sample player and they discovered the demo was being done by SOS contributor Paul Wiffen, who had developed many of the factory sounds for the Elka Synthex back in 1982. Fausto and Mike took Paul for a coffee after the demo and once he had signed an NDA, revealed that the Lynex would retail for under a thousand pounds. Paul was under another NDA with Dave Cockerell and Chris Huggett who were developing Akai’s first 16-bit sampler, the S1000, with a projected retail of almost £3000. Even with the cost of an Atari ST (which many musicians in the UK already owned to run Cubase or Notator/Creator on), this was a substantial saving, so Paul immediately saw the potential. Fausto and Mike asked Paul to consult on the Lynex, giving advice, developing library sounds and demonstrating the product at its launch (planned for Winter NAMM January 1988). The only snag was that Paul was about to go on a European and Australasian tour with Stevie Wonder till the end of the year but when they assured him that the first working prototype would not be ready until Christmas, he immediately signed on with Commander Electronics, the distribution company Nando and Fausto set up to handle Lynex sales, as they would fund the trade shows and other travel needed to launch the product.
By the time they all flew to NAMM in late January 1988, Paul had a first demo together and had persuaded his friends at Atari to show the Lynex on their Atari booth. But on the plane to Los Angeles, Mike and Paul finally had some time to sit and talk through the future of the product. Paul mentioned that it was a shame that someone using Cubase or Notator to sequence on [their were no DAWs yet] had to buy a second ST and connect them via MIDI to be able to sequence the sounds of the Lynex. Mike had a flash of inspiration. If he could come up with an Atari Desk Accessory to route MIDI internally, could Paul persuade Steinberg and C-Lab to support what Paul dubbed the “Internal MIDI Pipeline” as an alternative destination for their sequencer tracks?
Paul set up meetings with Charlie Steinberg and Gerhardt Lengeling in the Anaheim Hilton bar the day before the NAMM show started and Mike persuaded them that it would only be a couple of hours coding to implement it. They agreed to work towards Frankfurt 1988 in mid-February to implement this cooperation.
Demos on the Atari booth at the NAMM show led to distributors from France, Germany, Italy and Japan signing on and Paul’s business partner in the States (a rare Atari user in a Mac-dominated territory) agreed to set up an American distribution operation to handle the product in the US. At Frankfurt the MIDI Pipeline was working in beta form and so Paul was able to do demonstrations on both the Steinberg and C-Lab stands (as there was no budget for a Lynett Systems booth). Atari France invited Paul to demo Lynex at their music dealer demos and Atari Italy offered a free booth at their show in Rimini that spring. The project was up and running!
The Lynex rack had 1MB of its own memory so that the samples could play back with no latency problems and the Atari’s memory wasn’t consumed by sample data but, sadly, massive rises in the price of RAM in the intervening months pushed the retail price up to £1899 on shipping but all the distributors remained on board. At the 1988 Summer NAMM, Atari once again hosted the Lynex demo and the first machines were sold, followed by the Paris Salon De La Musique and the British Music Fair in London.
Mike Lynch receiving the SOS Hi-Tech Award for 'Best Software Sampler' from Editor Ian Gilby in 1988.
Unfortunately the promised software updates to read Akai, Prophet and Ensoniq library disks never materialised and, since most users were not making their own samples but using library disks, this did depress sales. Plus rumours were spreading that both Sequential Circuits and Akai were developing 16-bit samplers (which both shipped by mid-1988) so Lynex's 16-bit sound quality advantage was being eroded. Then Nando Fabi (who was quite old when the project had started) died and his son Fausto had to take over the entire operation. Manufacturing quantities had been over-optimistic and soon the Akai S1000 was selling to professionals and S950 to the lower market and, what with the lack of the promised software updates, Fausto made the decision to concentrate on his growing amp distribution business and wound up Commander Electronics.
Designing For Cheetah
Cheetah SX-16 Stereo 16-bit Sampler - designed by Mike Lynch.But not before Fausto thankfully had recommended Mike’s skills to Cheetah Electronics of Cardiff, who had been growing a MIDI master keyboard business and had just released the MS6, an 6-voice multitimbral analogue synth rack designed by Ian Jannaway and Chris Huggett (later of Novation) with factory presets by Bob Pearson and Paul Wiffen. Cheetah were keen to do a 16-bit stereo sampler and Fausto suggested that Mike could take the Lynex and make it a standalone sampler, as the spec was exactly what they were looking for. The deal was duly done and the SX‑16 stereo sampler became one of two products that Cambridge Neurodynamics (as Lynett Systems had now been re‑branded) would design for Cheetah.
The other was the innovative MS800 wavetable synth inspired by the likes of expensive PPGs, Prophet VS or Korg Wavestations for which Mike was able to quickly design the hardware. A new business partner at Cambridge Neurodynamics, Richard Gaunt (who would be Mike’s best man when he married years later) took on the task of allowing the user to sum digital harmonics which would then be rendered to create complex waveforms never before achieved on a £200 multitimbral unit with 15 voices. If that wasn’t clever enough, two of the half-rackmounted units could be hooked up to form a 30‑voice system (or 45 with three, 60 with four, and so on). Ingenious.
Cheetah MS800 sound module - designed by Mike Lynch and Richard Gaunt.
D2D Systems ADAS
Cheetah was to be handling all the manufacturing and distribution on these products so, while they were being developed from 1989 onwards, Mike had spare bandwidth to look at other possibilities, and so invited Paul Wiffen to dinner to talk about future directions. Paul now convinced Mike that the sampler market was getting crowded with the name brand American and Japanese manufacturers and that hard disk recording of audio (as opposed to storing the audio in RAM for sample playback) was the future.
From from their ensuing conversations Mike conceived and designed the ADAS, a much smaller unit which could stream up to four audio tracks, again under Atari control. Because it didn’t need megabytes of RAM like the samplers, it could be produced for under £1000. It also implemented the genius MIDI Pipeline so it could be controlled by Cubase or Notator with no further updates from them. The brand name D2D Systems was coined for this product, as the Cambridge Neurodynamics name was confusing for musicians.
D2D Systems D2D-Edit and 4T/FX running on the Atari Falcon030.As Paul was a big champion at this time of Digidesign’s Sound Designer software for Emulator II, Ensoniq Mirage, Prophet 2000 and Akai S900, he had been shown an early version of their Sound Tools PCI card/software, demonstrated behind closed doors on the much more expensive Macintosh II, which could be configured as a stereo audio editor or 4-track audio recorder alongside MIDI-based Mac sequencers like Opcode Vision and Mark Of The Unicorn's Performer. He and Mike worked out that a comparable system could be assembled on the Atari with the ADAS controlled by Cubase or Notator for a quarter of the price!
The system was well received at the 1989 Frankfurt Musikmesse but showing on the Atari booth at NAMM had raised little interest, in America everyone was wedded to the Mac. On the flight home, Mike asked Paul if there was a cheaper Mac which could have hardware added. Paul suggested the more inexpensive Mac SE which could take an internal card of proprietary design. Mike returned to Cambridge, bought an Apple Macintosh SE, and had a prototype card working by Frankfurt that was carried around inside the compact SE and shown to interested parties inside meeting rooms and booth offices. Again Steinberg and C-Lab said they would implement the similar MIDI Pipeline system on the Mac, since it had taken so little time on the Atari.
The Alchemist
But a chance meeting with Donny Blank (whose Alchemy software was taking over from Sound Designer II as the audio editor of choice on the Mac) at a party held at the AES Show in New York in 1988 had given a glimpse of a bigger possibility. Donny was looking for a cheaper audio solution to bundle with his Alchemy software and he loved the specs mentioned to him for the Mac SE card. Paul flew to San Francisco in 1989 with a card and Donny excitedly installed it inside his own Mac SE and flipped over the sound quality. He offered to distribute the card in North America which was perfect synergy as the Lynex had been completely ignored on that side of the Atlantic; it needed someone already recognised and embedded in the American Mac market to take the ball and run with it. They did the deal on a handshake and Paul left the prototype card with Donny to start supporting it in the next Alchemy update.
It was agreed that the Mac SE card as an Alchemy-compatible product would be launched on the Blank Software booth at the Autumn AES show in Los Angeles in 1989. ADAS Mac SE was launched in Europe at the Apple Expo in Paris in June 1989 and small quantities were shipped in Europe by the Lynex distributors on the promise of Alchemy support, but it was clear that the big market was going to be in North America.
However, a real Act Of God intervened. On Oct 17th, an earthquake hit the San Andreas fault south of central San Francisco where Blank Software's offices were located. Their building (into which Donny had sunk a lot of Blank’s capital) was structurally damaged. Donny and the company had to move out until an inspection could be conducted. But Los Angeles was not impacted, so plans to launch the card at AES seemed unaffected. However, after Mike and Paul landed at LAX airport, they heard that Blank’s building had been condemned and was to be demolished. Even worse, their insurance turned out not to cover earthquake damage and so Donny had lost pretty much everything. He had decided to quit product development and go back to sound design for movies (Alchemy had started as his own bespoke tool for his first career) and Donny had cancelled exhibiting at the AES. This meant there was no booth to showcase the Mac SE ADAS and no Mac SE to show it on (as travelling back then with even a self-contained unit like the Mac SE was a nightmare for customs), as they had only brought a couple of production cards with them. They didn’t even have a copy of the compatible beta version of Alchemy software, which is what everyone wanted to see.
Reeling from the shock of this massive disappointment, they did what demos they could on the Atari ST version in their nearby motel room but there was little more interest than the year before. Ironically, payment for a couple of sales to sound editors who had seen the Atari version in New York the year before had come through, so Paul shipped the NAMM demo units of the Atari version to them before they caught the plane home. On their usual brainstorming session on the flight, Mike stated that they really needed to find a company with experience of manufacturing as the small Cambridge offices at the St John’s Innovation Centre was fine for R&D and coding but too cramped for anything more. Paul promised to look out for someone, without really having much of an idea who. Manufacturers in the UK were few and far between.
Lone Wolf
However fate intervened. At the 1990 Winter NAMM, Paul’s friend Lachlan Westfall (who ran the International MIDI Association) told Paul of a new long distance MIDI cabling system transmitting over fibre-optic cables and took him to meet Mark Lacas, the electronics genius behind it.
They met at Mark’s company Lone Wolf whose offices were south of LAX in Redondo Beach and Paul got very excited at the idea as he had started working on designing stage setups for the likes of Elton John and John Miles (now Tina Turner’s MD) who wanted to get their main MIDI keyboard way out front to engage the audience but keep all the racks and other MIDI gear out of sight offstage. He had first done this on that Stevie Wonder tour back in 1987 by having all the MIDI slaves underneath the rotating stage with cables going down a central hole but still running into problems with MIDI’s 25 metre cable length restriction. Paul could see the solution here to contracts he already had.
Lone Wolf had already set up European distribution through a British company called Plasmec in Farnham, who made the Mosses & Mitchell patchbays used in SSL and other major brands of mixing desk. They were looking to get into digital audio connectivity and saw Lone Wolf as a step in that direction with MIDI, but they had no experience in MIDI or digital. Mark rang Cameron, the MD of Plasmec back in England and suggested they use Paul as he lived in Croydon at the time. Cameron invited Paul over when he got back to the UK and when he walked in, he immediately saw the manufacturing capability that Mike had asked him to look out for.
Keeping his powder dry, he bided his time, delivering touring systems using Lone Wolf fibre-optics to Elton John and John Miles. He travelled to the AES show in Paris with the Plasmec Sales Manager (another Mike) and introduced him to Musicland’s Francis Mandin, who had sold more Lynex’s than anyone else. Paul Wiffen did the first ADAS demo with Cubase not only playing the backing track on a E-Mu Proteus (Francis was also the E-Mu distributor) but dropping the ADAS in and out of recording and immediately looping playback of the guitar parts for the song 'Black Velvet'. The Plasmec salesman was astounded that such things were possible and asked at dinner that night if there was some way that Plasmec could get involved.
The next day was spent doing a major Lone Wolf demo to Jean-Michel Jarre, who was preparing the biggest concert in the history books at Paris La Defense to celebrate the 200th year of the French Republic and the huge stage was proving lethal to the MIDI connections between the musicians for synchronisation and sequencing. Paul and Mike were invited back for the show on July 14th with an order for eight MIDItaps (the unit which changed the MIDI into fibre-optic signals and back) but in the car on the way home all Mike could talk about was the potential of this recording/playback via sequencer notes on the ADAS.
Full Steam Ahead With Plasmec
On the hovercraft crossing the channel, Paul ventured the subject of a role for Plasmec in the manufacturing of ADAS — but Mike wanted more. After a consultation with MD Cameron back in Farnham, Mike Lynch was invited down from Cambridge to discuss Plasmec not only manufacturing the ADAS but Mike developing Mac, PC and Standalone versions which Plasmec would distribute. Negotiations weren’t that swift (even though he and Paul knew this was the ideal solution) as Mike was always a canny negotiator, so let himself be slowly persuaded over a few sumptuous dinners. A week later the press releases went out that Plasmec would be manufacturing and distributing ADAS under license from now on and developing versions for the other platforms.
Suddenly the hand-to-mouth existence of the ADAS product development was gone and the budgets were there to develop all four versions side-by-side, so more engineers and software writers were hired. It was full steam ahead and at the APRS Show in London, a big Plasmec booth showed the rebadged Atari products and prototypes of the Mac, PC and Standalone versions.
There was also time to work on a new number-plate recognition system that Mike had conceptualised...
Number Plate Recognition & Consultancy
There was also time to work on a new number-plate recognition system that Mike had conceptualised and as the Atari coder was less pressed than the others, he was put in charge of developing the software to do the character recognition from a video system without any still photograph being taken. This became Cambridge Neurodynamics’ first product outside of music and eventually evolved into the gantry camera systems found on the M25 motorway and the other fixed speed limit sections of the M1 and further north. Suddenly there was government interest in Mike’s technology and government budgets to be tapped. Cambridge Neurodynamics subsequently went through a serious growth phase.
Lynett Systems was also engaged by audio restoration pioneers CEDAR Audio in 1992, when CEDAR approached them to help develop the hardware for the world’s first standalone audio restoration units. CEDAR knew of Mike because, like three of its own engineers, he had studied under Professor Peter Rayner at the Engineering Department in Cambridge University. The results were the first versions of the DC-1 Declicker and CR-1 Decrackler. These were in production for two years before being superseded, and a handful are believed to remain in use to this day.
Ensoniq used their skills in dealing with the problems of getting analogue, digital and Esquared signals all living in harmony on the same EPROM and Japanese manufacturers like Sony, Matsushita, Yamaha and Korg drew on their expertise in a wide range of products and as audio was becoming increasingly important in luxury car sales, their technology found its way into Ford Of Europe brands like Jaguar, Range Rover and Aston Martin.
Enter The Atari Falcon030
But the writing was on the wall for the ADAS, at least on the Atari initially (which was the bestseller by far of all four versions), as the European musicians’ favourite computer manufacturer announced a 68030-based computer in 1991, called the Falcon030. This featured a separate onboard DSP chip and 16-bit AD/DA converters. Significantly, it needed no additional hardware to do full 16-bit 50kHz stereo recording and (with Cubase Audio sequencer) offered up to 16 tracks of simultaneous playback using the DSP chip to D/MUX them. Steinberg would even build an accompanying 8-out box for external mixing.
Mike was unfazed, almost cheerful: “Great! Always hated hardware! We’ll just sell D2D-Edit and 4T/FX as software only versions!”
Licensing
“Do the work once, get paid over and over again!” became his mantra.
We at SOUND ON SOUND hope this tribute to our friend Dr Mike Lynch shows a different side to the so-called 'Tech Billionaire', who won his 10-year battle with Hewlett Packard this year, after being allowed by the UK government to be extradited to the States, only to tragically lose his life and that of his 18-year old youngest daughter, Hannah, along with business and personal friends celebrating his release. Our deepest sympathies and condolences go to his wife, Angela (who was miraculously rescued from the superyacht Bayesian before it capsized and sank) and to Mike's eldest daughter, Esme.
RIP Mike, you will never be forgotten.
