I was kind of curious about this synth myself. It was tough to find one to demo.

Finally found one last year in my friend's studio. It was placed right next to his Access Virus.

First off it didn't sound like any Oberheim I've ever played/heard. Front panel layout is indeed very user friendly. Everything you need is right in front of you. Very little need to browse menus (if any(. Mixed feelings about its sound. I'm not into using buzzwords like 'thin' or 'phat' so I won't say that its 'a bit on a thin side'. That kind of a description is way too ambiguous.

To me it sounded very much like Novation Nova. Although the Nova has more polyphony, cleaner FX, no latency or sluggishness... I guess those were the main turn offs for me.

Filters seemed good for sweeps and bubbly type sounds but useless for anything that requires filter self oscillation. Mind you the original Oberheim synths like OBX and OB-Xa did not have filters that could self oscillate. Nothing that stopped people from using them.

Oscillators are just as harsh sounding as any VA oscilators. Kind of sucks that most VA synths use wavetables instead of using the actual analog oscillator models but I guess it cuts the cost. I'm not refering to spectral wavetables and wavetable interpolation of course. OB-12 doesn't have that stuf. But even though it's saw/square sound okay when you play the lower and mid-range keys expect some annoying distortion and aliasing when playing notes in the upper range. But that's the case with *any* VA synth and even my new VIrus TI is no exception.

So to sum it up its a decent synth that gives you lots and lots of knobs and sliders to play with. Has a good enough VA sound but doesn't really come close if you compare it to say Matrix 12. In fact I think most people who were disappointed in OB-12 expected it to have the features, response and tone architecture of a Matrix 12. .. And of course that's not the case.

Having compared it to the original Access VIrus i'd say that the Virus sounds better. At the same time I find that Access synths can use a little more harshness and edge and that's what I think an OB-12 has plenty of.

-ED-