[sdiy] Moog Piano Bar

[Peter Grenader]

I owned an OBMX for a little bit.  I have to be real careful what I say here
for a slew of reasons.

For it's time, it was an incredible undertaking,  While the initial units
with the original OS did not work at all, the version 2 (or 2.1 , I don't
remember) worked just fine, if you knew how to turn off the tunings to the
keyboard.  (there's another trick you can do by launching into demo mode for
a second, which fixes any tuning errors, and then going back into the
program you were working with).

There were also problems with the voice cards as they didn't really plug and
play from one machine to the other all that well (again, tracking).

Sonically, they were CEM based (filters and VCOs) and had the particular
sound inherent to those chip sets.

As far as the whole mess that took off between Don, Lynx Crow and Gibson, it
became a real mess.  Yeah, Gibson screwed up with part subs - but they
already had a bizillion parts from the initial design purchase before Don
was even involved.  That's one area where Gibson really missed up on two
counts - buying quantity before a design was finalized and then trying to
make the wrong type of parts work in the new circuit. .Add to the mix the
saying one thing to Don and doing another - not the makings for a trustful
relationship, business or otherwise.

Then Don started to develop an instrument that was WAY above the spec
delivered to him by Oberheim/Gibson.  While his intentions where honorable
and would have made for essentially a Buchla 700 on steroids, it wasn't what
he was hired to do and that caused problems and a lot of ill feelings
between the two parties.

Then Gibson made the fateful mistake of ASSUMING they owned exclusive rights
to the technology and started using parts of it in other instruments later
on and Don sued the shit out of them for it, and then turned on Lynx Crow
for reasons I've never known.

Bottom line, the instrument took SO long to come to market, and SO much
money was spent on it before box one was ever completed, it was was doomed
from the get-go and died a miserable and agonizing death due to the $$ they
had to charge for it for any hopes of reclamation.  On top of that, the OS
was not yet even working right hen they did release it, so the consumer was
faced with an overpriced instrument that didn't work right and said 'pass'.

Lynx developed a new OS that did work dandily, but it was way too late by
then.  It real easy to get a bad rep

- Peter

Neil Johnson wrote:

> 
>> What would be really interesting is to have both of them working together
>> on a new synth design. Who wouldn't want a synth that BOTH these fellows
>> collaborated on?
> 
> Another example of Buchla's design effort being the ill-fated "Oberheim"
> OBMX.  No input from Tom, sadly.  Would be interesting to hear one in
> action.
> 
> Neil
> 
> --
> Neil Johnson :: Computer Laboratory :: University of Cambridge ::
> http://www.njohnson.co.uk          http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~nej22
> ----  IEE Cambridge Branch: http://www.iee-cambridge.org.uk  ----
>