OBERHEIM SYNTH

"Regarding the OBX repair, it's not easy, many parts
are long obsolete."

 I have recently had my OBX serviced by EPR
electronics and they not only repaired and tuned the
unit but they took mine from a 4 voice to an eight
voice and at a very reasonable price. They are great
with all things analog prophets Obie's ppgs ect...
great guys in Tampa that still repair vintage analog
synths at realistic prices. 

Kevin Kelley 
www.keyboardmuseum.org


--- Les Lambert <les_lmbrt@...> wrote:

> The OBX has an upper and lower voice tray, each of
> which has space for 4 voice cards. This is also true
> of the OBXa.
> The two layers are interconnected by either a ribbon
> or long darning needle type rods, I forgot which. 
> I've owned  both of these instruments, but it's a
> while since I looked inside.
> The voices only sound if the switches allocating
> them
> are in the correct position, and the auto-tune can
> bring them into locally correct pitch.
> The information on the insides of these oldies has
> been posted before, but some of the scans are almost
> unusable.
> 
> The voice cards are NOT interchangeable between
> these
> two models, even if you could find them. 
> The OBX had no voice card voltage regulation, and
> the
> tuning is therefore so liable to step changes due to
> poor contacts that it was a chore to play except in
> unison, where the tuning wierdos fattened the voices
> nicely, but somewhat randomly. 
> The OBXa voice cards have an on-board voltage
> regulator, which keeps the cards more stable, but
> not
> really that closely matched with temperature
> variation, so once again, the tuning isn't digitally
> perfect and the voice thickening is a feature here
> too. I generally put some mod on the pitch of osc2
> anyway, so fatter chorus.
> 
> I also owned the OB8 which definitely has ribbons,
> and
> a totally redesigned interior. Only the case is
> similar.The OB8 has none of this, and sounds more
> like
> the original Matrix 6.
> Even though they put in a voice tuning scatter
> parameter in page2 when that arrived, they still
> didn't sound the same, bathwater gone, where's the
> baby. For a time I had 2 OB8's but still didn't get
> a
> sound like the OBX or OBXa.
> The bigger box means there's room for Triggers and
> gates, pedals in and pan pots on the outside of the
> cse. They also upgraded the modulation section to
> include externally clocked arpeggiation, at least
> from
> the DMX or similar. The patches are storable via
> MIDI,
> but the instrument had nowhere to store any names
> you
> might have wanted, even though my patch librarian
> did.
> 
> Regarding the OBX repair, it's not easy, many parts
> are long obsolete.
> My remaining OBXa has been out of action for some
> years now, so have been layering M6,M1000 and when I
> can face the complexity of the beast, the Xpander.
> 
> Those who can't find the real thing may be
> interested
> to know that there are to my ears, some very close
> approximations of the Oberheim factory patches in
> the
> Kurzweil K2500 factory patches, even without FX
> added.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>      
>
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