Oberheim Teo-5 official release video

[dazzjazz]

This synth sounds very good to me. Enjoy. 
Let’s take a breath before we start to complain…!

 

[CrossRhodes]

Looks like a fun synth! In depth review from Loopop:
 

 

[Stokely]

Loopop's vids are fantastic.  Wish there were more in-depth, no-bs vids like those (there are some other good ones, like S. Carr's comparisons etc).

Sounds great to my ear.

I skipped a bit but I didn't see a comparison to the Take 5 (though I did see a bit talking about the Ob-6).

[niacin]

i was all ready to pick up a Take-5 🤔.  Is the sound of this more OBX8 or more OB6/SEM ?

[dazzjazz]

It has a SEM filter. 

[niacin]

 

ok, so SEM filter, oscillators from the Take-5, envelopes from the OB-X8.

[CyberGene]

I recently sold my Take 5. It was a fun instrument but the things I disliked about it were more than those I liked:

 

1. I got fed up with it suddenly going so out of tune that it was just some cacophony. Yeah, I calibrated it many times and according to Sequential this will make it more stable with time since there's an internal temperature table, so calibrating it across different temperatures would eventually create the proper curve but it kept doing it.

2. Buggy software, I've reported myself a few bugs that were acknowledged, didn't get fixed.

3. Patch management is awful. You have to purchase a software that is actually very ugly or rely on some MIDI sysex stuff.

4. If you load a patch, there's no way to easily see the actual value of a knob. In order to match the knob to the stored value, you have to turn it VERY slowly and look for a dot appearing in the 3-segment LED. You can easily miss it if you blink, it's there for a split second. On Novation synths when you turn a knob you see the stored value vs current value on the display, so you know in which direction to turn and how much.

5. (yep, kept it for bullet number 5): five voices is just too few for my type of playing

6. Although it sounds great, it doesn't sound better than a virtual synth. If it was easy to tweak patches (see bullet number 4), then it would have advantage over software synths.

 

It was a missed opportunity and I'm glad I sold it. My Hydrasynth can make circles around the Take 5 and can sound as analog, or even more. But it can also do so much more than it.

[J.F.N.]

Building 5 voice polyphonic synths feels like a joke when Behringer delivers 16 voices for less money (and with 5 octaves). I sure know who'll get my CC.

[RABid]

On 5/17/2024 at 3:53 AM, CyberGene said:

I got fed up with it suddenly going so out of tune that it was just some cacophony.

This has scared me off from Take 5 and a few other Sequential synths, most recently Trigon 6. Reviews done by long term users (not people who got it for free and rushed out a review) frequently bring up irritations about having to recalibrate more often than they expected. I should not be surprised having gone through the 80's with a stack of analogs. I'm back to considering Summit or JunoX, both with digital oscillators. Or just being honest with myself and saying I don't really need another synth.

[synthdogg]

I think it sounds great, and it's super tempting. I like the sound and the feature set, and think there's probably a great market for it. 

 

Personally, I do wish they would come out with a slightly big brother version with a few more voices - maybe a REV2 format or something, but as it stands it's a nice option to add that SEM flavor to my Prophet 10

[dazzjazz]

Yes it is tempting indeed.

I’ve always wanted an Oberheim, and the OBX8 is unaffordable right now. 
This might fill that space, although I do wonder if they will one day make a flagship-type synth like the OBX8, but with a more modern feature set - more modulation, effects, etc. 

[Fleer]

Love my Take 5 and its five Prophet voices as much as I disliked the Hydrasynth’s diginoise, good riddance.
But while the Take 5 is sheer Sequential bliss, I wouldn't get the Teo 5 as those continuous Oberheim pads do need more than five voices indeed.  

[CyberGene]

I remember one more thing I disliked about the Take-5 in comparison to the Hydrasynth: the aftertouch. It’s abrupt and hard to control, even if you change settings. 
 

However, yes, the Take 5 is easier to make sounding analog, it’s analog after all 🙂 The Hydrasynth tends to sound harsh and digital at first. But once you know what to do, IMO it can sound more analog than the Take 5, as ridiculous as that sounds 😀 Here’s one patch I created on the Hydra that I’ve posted previously:

 

 

[Fleer]

Pretty nice indeed. But still pretty digital…

[CyberGene]

@Fleer give me a patch from the Take 5 and I’ll try to match it and then we can publish it and ask people to choose which one they think is which. It would be an interesting comparison. I don’t have the Take 5 though, you can record it if you’re OK with that. 

[Fleer]

On 5/22/2024 at 8:23 AM, CyberGene said:

@Fleer give me a patch from the Take 5 and I’ll try to match it and then we can publish it and ask people to choose which one they think is which. It would be an interesting comparison. I don’t have the Take 5 though, you can record it if you’re OK with that. 

Good idea, but I got to get back home for that, mid July at the latest. 

Maybe I’ll even get a Teo 5 in the meantime. Could be fun to compare both!

[synthetic]

TEO-5 seems cool. I already flipped my Prophet 10, maybe I would like this more. 

 

But when did 4-octave keyboards become the default for new synths? '70s through the '00s was mostly 5-octave keyboards. 4-oct still looks like a toy to me. Even if I'm not using the full range, I like it to be there without weird split transpose modes. And the companies who do make a 5-oct version (Hydrasynth, Wavestate) obviously use the guts of the 4-oct, so the knobs are all clumped in the center and it looks dorky. Yeah I know it's a cost thing, but how much do 11 more keys and a slightly longer chassis cost? Not much. 

[J.F.N.]

4 octaves and 5 voices, talk about taking several steps backwards...

 

Everything under 8 voices equals monophonic in my world (in terms of usability)... And 16 voices is where I start to take things more seriously...

[felis]

On 5/19/2024 at 4:42 PM, dazzjazz said:

Yes it is tempting indeed.

I’ve always wanted an Oberheim, and the OBX8 is unaffordable right now. 
This might fill that space, although I do wonder if they will one day make a flagship-type synth like the OBX8, but with a more modern feature set - more modulation, effects, etc. 

 

If they do make something like that, it will probably be equally unaffordable.

 

Despite the 5 voices and 44 keys, I like what I'm seeing and hearing of the TEO-5.

[Theo Verelst]

 

 

 

[Mighty Motif Max]

Had the chance to play one of these today at Guitar Center. The keybed was quite nice - very pleasant to play and the aftertouch was nice. I really wish it had more keys though - I particularly miss having a low "E" for bass parts. It sounds pretty great - even the presets are pretty good, and the user interface was friendly enough that even an analog novice like me was able to do some editing easily.

 

The limited range of keys makes it a harder sell for me, personally...otherwise I'd be pretty tempted. It's a nice synth. Ironically, there was actually a Behringer UB-XA sitting right below it, so I could A/B them a little bit (yeah, I know it's not an apples-to-apples comparison). I think the built-in effects on the TEO-5 help polish the sound out, and I really appreciate those in a synth. Sometimes it's nice to not have to remember all your outboard effects settings and just have everything in one patch, ready to pull up.

[felis]

TEO-5:  I want one.

[JoJoB3]

Looks like fun, what's the price for entry?

[YashN]

$1,500 at Sweetwater.

[YashN]

While I'm not familiar with the SEM sound, this sounds great and does have the iconic Oberheim sound, just listen to the resonant filter sweep. This with the Mod Matrix makes it a powerful and affordable Oberheim.

 

There's definitely room for one to three additional voices, potentially an 8-voice with a single SVF Filter architecture like this one, or a 24dB/oct  or a switchable one. The OB-X8 re-implements several of the historic Oberheim filters so there's an intermediate price point for an 8-voice there.

 

As for the Ubehreim, I listened to a video on YT of the factory patches vs an Oberheim (by Synth Legends) and it fails to reproduce the pluck and iconic resonant filter sound [Edit: The S&H also falls short]. You will get more voices, but the iconic sound isn't there. There have been some tweaks in v2.0 of the firmware but I do not know if this brings the sound closer. The difference might even be a hardware implementation issue. So yes, if you want more voices at an affordable price, you'll get them here but just don't expect it to sound like an Oberheim. Too bad, I was eyeing it as my first entry in the Oberheim sound.

 

5-voices may not be a big issue for most people - it depends on what you play and record, but for a low voice count synth as the TEO-5, multi-timbrality is a must to make it more useful. Bonus points if it is accompanied by separate arpeggiators. Is it multi-timbral?

 

Hydrasynth is quite flexible but doesn't cut it: if you compare to an Oberheim or an analogue, where's the bass region, it's really not comparable. This said, there have been inroads done on emulating analogue with digital especially in the algorithms and models departments, so in the future, we may see digital (and Hybrid) synths with much better sound and no audible signs of Digititis (it is a real thing and depends a lot on both algorithms and hardware implementation).

 

If you can live with the 5 voices, what a sound!

[YashN]

Daniel Fisher's demo