Oberheim OB-12 (2001–2003)
The OB-12 is a complicated entry in the Oberheim catalog. The synth itself is simple enough. The trouble is the name on the front panel. It was introduced at the 2001 NAMM show and sold through 2003, and it was the first Oberheim-branded product released after Gibson Guitars acquired the name following the original company's bankruptcy. It was manufactured by Viscount International, the Italian organ builder, and based on Viscount's Basic 12 architecture. Tom Oberheim had no involvement. He told SonicState plainly that "the synth is not ours."
That identity problem shaped the reception. Sound On Sound reviewed it under the title "Oberheim OB-12" while openly asking whether the name had been misappropriated. The OB12.com FAQ is blunter, calling it a rebadged Viscount with no relation to Tom Oberheim's designs. Even Gibson, which owned the name, reportedly didn't want it used on this product. It looks like it belongs next to the OB-Xa and OB-8, but it was never meant to be their successor.
Here is what the synth actually is. It has 10 voices of polyphony, 61 keys, two oscillators per voice, and a multimode filter stage (low-pass, band-pass, high-pass, and a vocoder mode) built around CEM3379-style chips. It has two LFOs, two ADSR envelopes, a built-in arpeggiator, and a 12-band vocoder with a mic input. Effects include distortion, chorus, flanger, phaser, and delay, running on three 32-bit floating-point DSPs with 24-bit DACs on the outputs. There are 512 preset programs plus 256 user locations in battery-backed RAM. The front panel is dense: dedicated knobs and rotary encoders for most functions, an XY touchpad, a joystick for pitch/mod, a backlit LCD, and a numeric keypad. Polyphonic aftertouch is available. The keybed itself was widely described as cheap and plasticky.
The sound engine is deeper than the presets suggest, and the programming flexibility earned praise. Sound On Sound noted that the synth looked like good value at £799 given its feature set, and that its programming went much deeper than the presets implied. Players into trance and techno took to it, and it sold reasonably well. Owners consistently cite the effects section, particularly the phaser, flanger, and delay, as the best part of the instrument. But the filters don't sound like the classic Oberheim SEM filter, and that was the dealbreaker for many. The presets lean cheesy, the effects can be harsh, and the front panel is hard to navigate without the manual. It also runs hot, has a noisy fan, and the external PSU is a known failure point.
The OB-12 is not a real Oberheim in the Tom Oberheim sense, and it doesn't sound like one. It is a Viscount-designed analog-modeling synth with a vocoder, an XY pad, and deep voice architecture. Used prices reflect the confusion, typically $300-500, well below what the feature set would suggest. The known issues are manageable: key contact strips go bad, the battery that holds user programs dies, LCD contrast fades, and the plastic joystick can break. Board-level repair is essentially impossible, since the synthesis engine runs on a proprietary Viscount ASIC that can't be sourced.
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