An original 1977 Amek mixing console — the one Prince used to track demos for the 1980 album Dirty Mind in his home studio on the North Arm of Lake Minnetonka — is now in INSIDER’s studio in Halle. The story, broken by VRT NWS on 17 April 2026 and picked up across Belgian press in the days after, closes a twenty-year arc that started in Minneapolis in 2003.
The console
The desk is an Amek board, hand-built in England in 1977 — the kind of large-format analog console that defined late-70s commercial recording before SSL standardised the format. Prince’s team bought it in 1980, RTBF reports, because “Prince had already spent all the money he received from Warner.” It was installed in his home studio and used to “record and track raw recordings and create rough mixes” (Propstore catalogue, 2024) for Dirty Mind and the follow-up Controversy. The takes from this room were so satisfying that the team kept the demos on the final record — the raw, dry, claustrophobic sound that helped make Dirty Mind one of the most influential albums of Prince’s catalogue.
When Prince moved his operation to Kiowa Trail and later to Paisley Park, he retired the Amek. Matthew “Dr. Fink” Fink, his keyboardist of more than ten years and a fixture of The Revolution, took it home.
2003: Minneapolis, the first “no”
In 2003, Vanderheyden moved to Minneapolis to record at Paisley Park with Dr. Fink, saxophonist Eric Leeds, and producer Greg Cohen. He stayed at Fink’s house. The Amek was already there.
“Ik wilde het mengpaneel 20 jaar geleden al kopen van Dr. Fink, maar kreeg toen een ‘nee’.”
Kris Vanderheyden, VRT NWS, 17 April 2026
(I wanted to buy the mixing console from Dr. Fink twenty years ago. He said no.)
2024: Propstore, London
In November 2024, the console went up at the Propstore Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction in London. The catalogue listed the Amek alongside Dr. Fink’s Oberheim OB-8 from the Purple Rain sessions. Estimates: $37,500 – $75,000 for the Amek; $62,500 – $125,000 for the Oberheim. The auction ran 14–17 November 2024, with the music items dropping on 15 November.
April 2025: the bid
Vanderheyden won the bid in April 2025. Final price has been kept private. The console then sat in legal limbo for eight months while the Prince Estate contested the sale — they had wanted the equipment for Paisley Park’s permanent collection. Negotiations resolved in late 2025 and the Amek arrived in Belgium in December 2025.
April 2026: the announcement
The story broke publicly on Friday, 17 April 2026, in VRT NWS (regional Halle / Vlaams-Brabant) and the same day on RTBF’s Classic 21 Journal du Rock. The timing is not coincidental: the following Tuesday — 21 April 2026 — marked exactly ten years since Prince’s death.
“Dat het nu gewoon in mijn studio ligt, is fantastisch. Het voelt extra bijzonder, omdat het volgende week dinsdag exact 10 jaar geleden is dat Prince overleed.”
Kris Vanderheyden, VRT NWS, 17 April 2026
(That it’s just sitting in my studio now is fantastic. It feels extra special because next Tuesday it’ll be exactly ten years since Prince died.)
“Echte fans weten dat dit veel meer is dan zomaar een mengpaneel.”
Kris Vanderheyden, VRT NWS
(Real fans know this is much more than just a mixer.)
What’s next: restoration, then a working studio
The console is currently being restored — Vanderheyden told RTBF the goal is to make it “bulletproof for the next 50 years”. Once the work is done, the plan is to keep it in active service in his studio and to make it available to other producers and bands looking for the dry, analog, late-70s sound it was designed to capture. “Echte fans weten dat dit veel meer is dan zomaar een mengpaneel,” he told VRT — and consistent with Prince’s own teaching philosophy, the desk will work, not just sit behind glass.
The Prince years — what came before
Vanderheyden’s history with the Prince camp predates the console by two decades. After “Destiny” (Music Man, 1991) made him a continental rave name, and after the Bonzai chart years (Sugar Is Sweeter UK #11, The Prophet UK #19, Armand Van Helden’s remix #1 on Billboard Hot Dance Club Songs), Vanderheyden moved to Minneapolis in 2003 to work at Paisley Park. The collaborators were:
- Dr. Fink (Matthew Fink) — keyboards. Member of The Revolution. Owned the Amek until 2024.
- Eric Leeds — saxophone. Long-time Prince collaborator from Sign o’ the Times through the late-period bands.
- Greg Cohen — production. Subsequently credited on records by John Legend, Lil Yachty, Nile Rodgers and Robin Thicke.
An album was tracked. It has never been officially released — and per Prince Estate convention, sits in the same vaults that have been the subject of a long excavation since 2016.
On Prince, in Vanderheyden’s words
“C’était un gars qui avait beaucoup de chance parce que chaque matin, quand il se levait, c’était un autre personnage. Parfois, il ne parlait pas pendant 8 jours… Il courait pour ne pas devoir croiser des gens… mais c’était aussi un blagueur, il était très fun.”
Kris Vanderheyden, RTBF Classic 21, April 2026
(He was a guy with a lot of luck — every morning when he woke up, he was a different character. Sometimes he wouldn’t speak for eight days. He’d run so he wouldn’t have to bump into people. But he was also a joker, very fun.)
Roughly 90% of the staff at Paisley Park, Vanderheyden told RTBF, never spoke to Prince directly.
In the press
- 🇧🇪 NL — VRT NWS — Hallenaar Kris Vanderheyden krijgt mengpaneel van Prince in handen (Evi Walschaers, 17 April 2026)
- 🇧🇪 FR — RTBF Classic 21 — La première console de mixage de Prince découverte en Belgique (April 2026)
- 🇬🇧 EN — MusicRadar — The Amek mixing board that Prince used to record Dirty Mind (Propstore auction, November 2024)
- 🇬🇧 EN — Yahoo Entertainment — Synth from Purple Rain era and the mixer that Prince used to record Dirty Mind are up for auction
- 📚 Reference — PrinceVault — Sunset Sound · Wikipedia — Dirty Mind
About the photographs
Press photos shown on this page are credited inline to VRT NWS / RTBF and used here for reference under fair-quotation conventions. When you have your own rights-cleared photos of the console — restoration shots, the studio, the article scans — upload them via Media Library and replace the inline images here. The page will also pick up a featured image automatically if you set one in the page editor.