I'll buy the keyboardless module as soon as it's available.
Bring it on!

 

37 mins of exploration, no talk

 

Considering there is demand and they've already made it I think the chances are good.

 

"UB-X is alive!
Today we've fired up the first complete prototype - what an amazing moment.
We’re now starting to implement the firmware and do thorough testing. Please bear in mind that we’re still far away from shipping the UB-X, but we’re making huge progress.
Isn't it a beautiful synth?" -B via FB

​

 

"To put speculations to rest, here are some pictures of the PCBs in the UB-Xa. There is a motherboard (containing the first 8 voices) and a daughterboard for voices 9 to 16. There are CoolAudio V3340 and V3320. 64 chips in all (2 VCOs and 2 filters per voice for 16 voices total). There are a LOT of components on these boards!" - Anon Via FB

 

Tim Shoebridge

 

"The synth is currently in beta testing and we are looking forward to shipping it soon."



The mini for $99 ​

 

Starsky Carr

 

Patchs comparison

 

I could hear distortion in some of the Behringer patches.
On the whole, the Oberheim seems fatter and richer sounding where the Behringer is brighter and thinner.
The Oberheim filter stands out more on the presets than the B.
Some patches sound better on one synth than the other, works both ways.
Might consider the Jupiter or Prophet 16 voice clones instead

 

Indeed overall the original sounds better

 

Every analog synth will sound different even from the same batch to say nothing about that Oberheimis 40 years old

 

^Note: the patches on the UB were programed by "synthlegends" on youtube, by ear, using his OB-Xa as reference. The patches on the X8 were simply loaded.

 

Starsky Carr, UBXa vs OBX8 // 2 modern takes on the OBXa

​

 

Relevant info concerning the video above: https://synthanatomy.com/2023/02/oberheim-ob-x8-review-analog-polyphonic-synthesizer.html

https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/oberheim-obx-obxa-ob8

 

the reviewer described the setup he used, and the two keyboards were going through different ad/da converters if i understood him correctly.

 

Agree but I think with the same converters they will still sound different. At least in my opinion of course.

 

For some reason he ran the synths through different signal paths/mic pres.

More things to consider:

The guy made no effort to match the sounds. I said it above, but for any new readers, the UB patches where programed by ear.

The Atrophy settings can, for example, make the UB sound brighter if one wants, among a lot of other stuff. It has like 31 or 32 parameters, so a lot can be done there. Personally I've never seen anything like it on a hardware analog synth. Pretty cool imo.

The X8, while it does have an Xa mode (the filter) it uses discrete SEM/OB-X “lineage” VCOs and the UB uses Curtis based oscillators.

I guess we will have to wait for the Behringer UB-X to see how well they do the SEM/OB-X flavor. They are different synths after all.

Not sure what Citrik means by the original sounding better. None of these are an original OB-Xa, which imo sounds better than all of these but that comes at a pretty unreasonable price these days, imo of course.