::: Oberheim OB-8 Innards :::

I've been meaning to post these for a while! The OB 8 is the main instrument i play when making music in the cave. It is interfaced with the DSX and they together form the basis for all my sequences. The OB is usually pretty happy but once in a while it goes haywire and loses it's mind for a minute. I've found that if i change the keyboard mode from whole to split to double and then retune the voice boards it comes back on line pretty swiftly. It's definitely an electrical connection or solder joint somewhere. I did a bunch of touching up when we took these pics and it's been much happier since. i never did locate one ' bad spot ' but i poked and prodded until i was pretty sure it is somewhere on the top voice board in the control section to the left. Pics mostly by J-poo!

Other Info:

The OB-8 ( much like the previous Oberheims ) was a work in progress. Many didn't have factory midi or were retrofitted ( often midi I/O was cut into the left wooden side panel. Later versions had a different silk screen on the front that denoted two sets of control features referred to as 'page two'. This one has factory midi but no page two screen. The voice two boards were configured with 4 voices each and communicated to one central CPU. The boards were designated in an upper and lower fashion much like Roland's polys of the era. Each board could have a unique patch for sophisticated layering and more dense tonalities!

The left side wood panel had 8 pots that were used to pan each voice left to right. This seems strange at first but can be very useful. It allows you to have two patches at one time mapped to different outputs or lets the two cards be moderately panned or hard panned for a wide thick stereo spread with one or two patches.