Correct. I made comparions between my new X8 and my vintage OB-8 and Xa using factory presets. It was eye opening how de-calibrated my vintage machines actually were! But overall tone wise, they are identical.
Same with my OB-X. The OB-X8 really nails that tone.
The odd man out is the OB-SX presets on the OB-X8. I restored my OB-SX ten years ago. When Oberheim duplicated those OB-SX presets for the OB-X8 I think their source OB-SX was not calibrated like mine is. The OB-X8 patches don't sound like my OB-SX. I suspect the filter cutoff is calibrated too high, IE the string patches are missing the "silk" on my machine.
When I get some time I'm going to iron out the patches to sound more like my OB-SX.
That’s cool that you have both those vintage oberhiem.s I wish I had kept my OBXA that I had bought used for $500 dollars many years ago. Seems so odd that people wanted all the digital synths that were being offered at the time
and analog synths were being discarded in favor of the digital romplers.
People were tired of tuning and maintenance issues so they favored romplers and soft synths. To my ears nothing sounds like the real thing.
The OB-X8 will be far less hassle maintenance wise - no trimpots under the hood to cause tuning issues.
Those vintage oberhiems are rare and command a high price today. The OBX8 cost 5 times what I paid for the used OBXA. I always regretted selling the OBXA. The OBX8
Is as close as I will ever get. I liked the look of the OBXA as well. If I remember correctly it had a heat sink. It was much larger than the OBX8 is.
I love my vintage Oberheims but they don't like getting bumped around so I will not gig them. They have MIDI retrofits in them but the MIDI implementation is pretty rudimentary (due to limitations of the stock electronics). For my gigs I use MIDI a lot and need better MIDI. That's why I immediately bought an OB-X8, sounds just like the vintage models and much better MIDI implementation. A lot lighter too.