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Synth Allegedly Previously Owned by Vangelis Sells for Record £401,465
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The Yamaha CS-80 is now the most expensive synth ever sold via auction
Christian Eede<br>Published 5:29pm 12 August 2026
A Yamaha CS-80 that allegedly belonged to Vangelis has sold for £401,465, making it the most expensive synthesiser ever sold via auction.
The prototype instrument has no serial number, but was Vangelis’ first CS-80, and was used on his 1977 album Spiral, according to the seller. A person based in Athens casually placed the item for sale via musical instrument marketplace Reverb last month, but provided no evidence for their claims about its previous ownership by the late Greek composer.
There was no official document of authentication to show that Vangelis had owned it, but the seller pointed to a distinctive cigarette burn on an A key as evidence of it previously being part of Vangelis’ synth collection.
Vangelis, who died in 2022, famously used a CS-80 synth in the production of some of his most famous scores, for films such as Blade Runner and Chariots Of Fire. It’s not known whether he used this specific unit on those soundtracks, but he did refer to it as "the most important synthesiser in my career" in a 1984 interview.
The previous record sale for an electronic instrument was a Kling Klang Sennheiser VSM-201 vocoder once owned by Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider, which sold for around $256,000 last November.
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Synth Allegedly Previously Owned by Vangelis Sells for Record £401,465
The Yamaha CS-80 is now the most expensive synth ever sold via auction
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