oberheim obmx price?

[alexp]

Originally Posted by W-W-Int

yeah i don't get the hate for the mx. you look it up on the net and it gets terrible reviews. yet anyone with one loves the sound. i had a friend that had one and it sounded fine to me. very deep basses, nice mod matrix, basically a matrix 1000 on steroids sound wise and while the envelopes aren't the fastest they are lightyears ahead of the matrix 1000's.

i just don't get the hate for it.
or the andromeda, sure it's ugly but it isn't what it looks like that matters but what it sounds like.

just because someone puts "moog filter" on the brocure people hate it when it doesn't do lucky man i guess. for $600-800 it's a bargain in analog synths.

Compare its to an OBXa or something.............. You will understand the hate then.......



alexP

[rolo]

ok... i have an OB8, and used to have an Obx and Two Voice I have owned my OBMX 6 vc for 2 years now... it's never going to leave. yes, the ENV's are slow, but it still has balls and tons of mod routing. it sounds very three dimentional running into my Summit or Millennia pres then to by apogee conv's then to my PT HD3 Accel rig monitored on Dyn bm6a's, Digi RM2's and Event ASP8's... everyone is different, but i just will never understand why so many people hate it. It stands it's ground around my OB8, Omega, Waldorf Q, Minimoog, Juno 60, Multimoog, Monopoly and many more.

[xpander]

i had an 8-voice OBMx for a day or two last year, most voices never worked right. i really wish i kept it & paid for someone to fix it as i *loved* the way it sounded and loved the interface, the green lights.

i'm going to see don buchla in a day or two, i gotta ask him about that project off-the-record.

also a fan of "real" oberheim synths, own an Xpander, OB-8, Matrix-1000.

two voice OBMx i'd say $700-$1000 a year ago, slightly less in today's market. btw, the Japanese OBMx synths ive seen have a front panel designed more like prototype than the US version. there's a great long article about the sordid development history of the machine, will make you NOT want to buy one and hate Gibson (if you don't already).

[LNerell]

Originally Posted by alexp

Compare its to an OBXa or something.............. You will understand the hate then....

I owned both an OBXa and OBMx at the same time. I bought my OBXa new and had it for 26 years. I've owned the OBMx nearly 15 years. They are both different enough that its kind of stupid to compare them. They are both cool in my book.

[LNerell]

Originally Posted by Coyoteous

I don't know if we're agreeing or disagreeing, but the OberMoog filter module was Richard's idea that actually came out of discussions he and I had, and that he subsequently had with others. And yes, that escalated into the MX.

I heard the story from Randy Picolet (sp?) who was an engineer at Oberheim during the ECC era, I think Randy was there until the bitter end before the Gibson buyout. Randy told me about this while we were both working for Philips Media in LA in the early 1990s. He didn't mention any names, I seem to remember it as a group engineering decision. When was Richard at Oberheim? I'm trying to place a face with the name, I was their in the mid-1980s so we might have crossed paths back then.

[Coyoteous]

I'll have to get with Richard on the timeline.

I believe he was a contracted consultant to Oberheim, and then later an employee/partner in Gibson Labs. He had a long history with Oberheim, ARP, Moog, Sequential, Emu, etc. running his factory authorized service center.

Going way back, he was at PAIA here in OK for a time and was contracted by John Simonton to do their famous hot pink flexidisk demo record with Richard's excellent "Epsilon Bootis:" Vitual PAIA 1974 Demo

You can hear the basis for Bugg's Cosmic Debris ensemble in this recording. Later he toured and recorded with Shawn Phillips among others and continued with continuous incarnations of the "Debris" in the 80's and 90's.

We played as a duo in the mid to late 80's, recording and doing close to 100 live performances with an over-the-top analog arsenal including Richard's large Emu modular. Anyway, that's just a fraction of his career.

Back to the OberMoog: Richard Bugg's and my discussions about this were to do a rackmount dual filter when the ladder filter patent expired. Certainly others could have had the idea for the same combination.

Nonetheless, a guy that had the idea ended up building it in the OBMX prototypes.

[MonoBrow]

So what would be a fair price for a 2 voice obmx(sound aside) what would you guys pay? I see a few ones on e-bay for around 1000€ but that seems very high for a 75% finished synth with very limited sysex/midi implementation and the whole bugs that come with it...stepping on the parameters etc.I guess around 300-400€ would be ok?

[tvirostek]

Originally Posted by soundsubs

Hmmmm. i always wondered how many NIN prototypes existed. One was on ebay about a year ago and the guy was going to try to reverse engineer a new board for them but im not sure where he got.

i do know that the original prototypes NIN had were significantly different to the ones that made it to the field.
i had a two voice, which i loved and never had any problems with. it was mean and nasty sounding (not bad) and was reliable. maybe i got lucky.


i would love to hear more from Mr Bugg if you get a chance Coyoteous!

I have one of the three (?) original prototypes, so I guess it's me that you're talking about.

One of the other owners contacted me, he was getting one of the original designers to help him get his unit up and running, never heard from him since. I got mine reassembled (it was beat to s**t), powered it up and played it a bit, really out of tune but at least worked. My next step was going to be cloning and reverse engineering the PC boards but my other projects took precedence, such as the new DSS-1 mod and ASR10 SCSI board.

I also did a clone of the OB-MX (production) voice board as they were scarce even 10 years ago when I got my first OB-MX. I built up about a dozen voice boards but then the supplies of some chips (CEM3374 , PD508, CEM3382) dried up (although I substituted SSM2300's for the PD508's). I even had some correspondence with Richard Bugg and Lynx Crowe (who worked on the prototype and production versions respectively), both great people and supportive of my efforts.

Hopefully soon I'll be revisiting the OberMOOG prototype soon, updating it with more modern technology and software. I'll be posting the results of this and other projects on http://web.me.com/tomvirostek.

[Oli]

Anyone feel like posting a compelling demo?

I tried one briefly in a store years ago. At the time, I really didn't think it was worth the price, and wasn't particularly impressed with the filter. Of course I didn't do much programming on it.

[Derp]

Just did a completed items search on eBay and they're going for well over two grand now. Shame as I was kinda curious as to just how bad it really was.

[Wiseguy]

It's a fantastic synth, totally awesome, people who don't like it are lazy or never had one.....bla bla bla.
Very rewarding what you can get out of it, at least if you know what you are doing.

Originally Posted by Derp

Just did a completed items search on eBay and they're going for well over two grand now. Shame as I was kinda curious as to just how bad it really was.

[mono-poly]

Originally Posted by RobJB06

not much cos it sounds like shit dfegad

IMO it's one of the coolest weirdest sounding poly synths.

[Beermaster]

Originally Posted by Wiseguy

It's a fantastic synth, totally awesome, people who don't like it are lazy or never had one.....bla bla bla.
Very rewarding what you can get out of it, at least if you know what you are doing.

. . . . sigh......

[The Real MC]

Originally Posted by Wiseguy

It's a fantastic synth, totally awesome, people who don't like it are lazy or never had one.....bla bla bla.
Very rewarding what you can get out of it, at least if you know what you are doing.

I've been programming analog synths since 1981, my first being a modular synth. I'm a very experienced Memorymoog programmer and was a member of the sound design team for the Alesis Andromeda.

I tried an OBMx back in the 90s and it was the lamest sounding analog synth I ever heard. My judgements are NOT based on the presets - I applied my programming tricks and I was pretty experienced by then. The moog/oberheim filters sounded nothing like their namesakes, the oscillators refused to stay in tune the entire two hours I was playing with it (autotune doesn't), and while it does have a flexible modulation system it isn't that effective for certain techniques.

I didn't like the OBMx and I can hardly be described as lazy or not knowing what I am doing. Be careful with blanket assessments...

[CoolColJ]

I remeber reading the Keyboard mag review, thinking, this is cool.

Then later playing with one at my local music store - it was glitching, sounded flacid, sluggish, dribbly, wibbly and weak

A bit like an Akai AX-73/VX90 more than anything, but those 2 probably sounded much better


I still have that Keyboard mag with the review

[Beermaster]

This is true Col,

It was the absolutely glowing review in sound on sound back in the day that made me buy one without ever trying one. The problem was that the reviewers for various magazines were given one of the two REAL obmx prototypes to test....thus glowing reviews. Gibson/Viscount/Oberheim then did the moody and ripped out the guts of the prototypes to make more profit and what's left is an abortion.

I'm not one to pre-judge things on visual aesthetics but you only have to see and touch an OBMX without it being turned on to have worries about the corners that have been cut and to have concerns that if the outside is this bad then what'd the inside like !. The buttons are the cheapest Christmas cracker toy quality of plastic... when you push on...you get this crappy shallow 'tic' mostly as hollow casing itself resonates... unlike the buttons on an OBX or OB8 (which are great) there is no spring assisted travel to the buttons.... they're just crude flat things that feel horrible. Guess what ? the Knobs are equally as shit and cheap too...they don't feel properly mounted and they seem to say "Lucky me ! I was going to be made into catheter tubing or burger boxes but i made it big time into an MB Games kids synthesizer !"

Now for a synth that costs as much as it did you'd think that they could have tried a little harder with these cosmetics so as to at least make the thing pretend to possibly be good ...... but they even dropped lower than that... The OBMX is the only synth that I've ever come across that has a an even cheaper hard board top to cover the access for the expansion boards....I mean this lid is bendy when you press it with your finger......its also got a wafer thin black-ish paint...which dulls and scratches without even touching it !...


Horrible

Horrible

Horrbile

[Wiseguy]

Fantastic Synth Period, i have a 12 Voice and i love it.

[Beermaster]

Originally Posted by Wiseguy

Fantastic Synth Period,

It's definitely a synth that is permanently on its menstrual cycle !

Originally Posted by Wiseguy

i have a 12 Voice and i love it.

As a door stop ?

As a thing to kick ?

As a shaker ?