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Microprocessor-controlled polyphonic analog synthesizer
During the late '70s and early '80s, synthesizers bearing the Oberheim name were among the most desirable instruments money could buy. Pick up Weather Report's classic Heavy Weather and you'll hear a lot of the Oberheim Four Voice -- particularly in "Birdland" - under Josef Zawinul's incomparable control.
The Four Voice, one of the first true polyphonic synths, was based on Tom Oberheim's SEM, the Synthesizer Expander Module. In January 1978, Sequential Circuits unleashed the Prophet-5, which was fully programmable and easier to deal with in live performance than the modular Four Voice. Oberheim's sales took a serious hit. "It became fairly dear by the Fall of '78," Tom recalls, "that if we didn't do something, we were going to be out of business."
Tom huddled with co-engineer Jim Cooper, now of JLCooper, and devised a new synth to compete with the Prophet-5: the OB-X. It was available in four-, six-, and, eight-voice configurations, and consisted of mostly the same voice structure that was found in the SEM. The only difference was the addition of the CEM 3310, a voltage-controlled envelope generator from Doug Curtis, the...