Black (well, gray at least) page in the history of Oberheim. This synthesizer is difficult to associate with Oberheim, for which there are a number of reasons:

First, Tom Oberheim did not take any part in the development of this product.

Second, this is the only fully digital synthesizer that bears the name "Oberheim".

Third, OB-12 was designed and manufactured outside the United States. It was produced by the Italian company Viscount, which had previously produced electric organs.

Oberheim OB-12 was introduced on the market in 2000 costing almost $2000. It also featured a lot of bugs. At this point on the synthesizer market, Access Virus, Korg Triton, Novation Nova II, Waldorf Micro Q and Yamaha CS2x ruled the music world - OB-12 could not compete with them. In 2002, the shortcomings of the first release were corrected, bugs fixed and the price got almost twice lower.
OB-12 is a digital synthesizer built on the virtual analog technology. It has a 12-voice polyphony with the ability to layer up to four timbres per note, which would eat the polyphony up reducing it to three voices. Each voice has two virtual oscillators producing a saw, a triangle, or a meander. The possibility of frequency modulation (FM) is enabled.

Virtual modulatable LFO produces sawtooth, triangular and rectangular waveforms; sample-and-hold (S&H) signal and noise source are also available.

OB-12 kept the original implementation of the filter section. It is also virtual, but contains two multifunction filters (LP, HP, BP) that can work in parallel or in series. Each filter has a cutoff slope of 12 dB per octave, thus having them switched in series allows you to get a slope of 24 dB per octave.

The synthesizer included a block of digital effects: chorus, delay, overdrive, echo. A 5-band graphic equalizer, DADSR envelope generators, a phrase recorder and an arpeggiator are provided.