Man, the Xpander is one thing I wish I had in my rig. Yeah, the polyphony
is limited, but the sounds are amazing and the depth of the beast is
unbelievable.

-----Original Message-----
From: oberheim@yahoogroups.com [mailto: oberheim@yahoogroups.com ] On Behalf
Of Les Lambert
Sent: Sunday, March 30, 2008 9:28 PM
To: oberheim@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [oberheim] OBX voices

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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