Oberheim DPX-1
Oberheim's rackmount sample player - the machine that let studios borrow sounds from the competition's disk libraries.
Overview
The DPX-1 gets lost in the shadow of Oberheim's keyboard synthesizers, but it filled a useful niche in late-1980s studios. The owner's manual carries a second-edition date of July 1988, which puts it squarely in the late-eighties rack-gear era.
The DPX-1's MIDI implementation had a quirk that outlived the instrument. A patch change sent while the modulation wheel (MIDI controller #1) was past halfway was read as a bank-select command rather than a program change. Oberheim carried that convention into later products. The Matrix-1000 owner's manual says its own bank-change mode "is the same as that found in the Oberheim DPX-1 and some other instruments," and that MIDI controller #31 exists as an alternative to the mod-wheel trick, for players who don't want an accidental bank switch mid-performance. The bank mechanics had to be right, because the whole point of the machine was shuffling between large sample sets.
Oberheim announced updates for the DPX-1 around the time of a US NAMM show, as reported in the trade press. The biggest was the HDX-1, an optional rackmounting hard disk drive that took 2U of rack space alongside the DPX-1. It was intended to store sounds originating from disks designed for the Sequential instruments the DPX-1 could read. A second update allowed separate outputs to be fitted to the DPX-1, giving it eight outputs that were fully responsive to the flexible output assignment scheme used on the E-mu S900. Studio Sound (December 1987, p.20) covered both announcements in its music news column.
Hard disk storage and individual outputs made the DPX-1 a serious studio tool. Eight assignable outputs meant a DPX-1 loaded with a drum library could feed a console's channels individually instead of being squeezed down to a stereo pair. The HDX-1 meant a studio could keep a working library resident instead of swapping floppies. Producer Reggie Lucas's rack, documented in the same publication, included a DPX-1 alongside a Synclavier II, a pair of Voyetra Eights, and a Yamaha TX816. The DPX-1 was not the centerpiece there. It was the library playback engine.
In any documentation that survives, the DPX-1 was not a sampler in the creative sense. It played back libraries and read other people's disks. For a late-eighties studio already invested in E-mu or Sequential sample libraries, that was what was needed.
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