I just sold my beloved Xpander. Found it a good home although it is
not with another Massey! :)

I'm having a problem getting the bass sound, that I had setup in the
Xpander, from my Logic 8 Virtual instruments. I thought I would be
able to find something that was close, given that I have so many
choices........ So far, no cigar..... :(

Nice read on the OBXa Les! I owned one of those beasts for several
years and it nearly drove me mad from the tuning drifting. I finally
heard of a repairman in San Francisco that knew what he was doing and
I put it on a Greyhound bus and shipped it to them from
Florida......... It was gone for quite awhile and when it came back,
it was much more stable. He had hardwired many of the connections
that had been made with the flat computer cable/plugs. I was able to
live with it until I got a MIDI kit for it and screwed it up royally.
I ended up giving it and the DSX sequencer to another musician.

I was able to get good use out of "The System" as the OBXa/DSX/DMX
were called. Did a couple of albums and a lot of tracks for our duo.
The Xpander worked well in this situation as it would do Control
Voltage (pre MIDI) with the DSX. Somewhere I still have the demo EP
of "The System" that I need to digitize.

Those were some fantastic engineers that Tom Oberheim assembled in his
company. I was able to keep making a living playing music, thanks to
those pioneers!

Charlie

On Mar 30, 2008, at 11:40 PM, Nicole Massey wrote:

> 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.
>
> __________________________________________________________