MATRIXSYNTH: Six Million Dollar Man Oberheim FVS-1 4 Voice with Programmer & Mods


Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Six Million Dollar Man Oberheim FVS-1 4 Voice with Programmer & Mods

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via this auction

"The Oberheim FVS-1 (Four Voice) is a 49 key, polyphonic analog synthesizer, featuring dual oscillators (with sync), resonant multimode (low, band, notch, or high pass with FM) filter, dual ADS envelopes, an LFO, 16 presets, proprietary tape interface, and CV IO. This model includes the Polyphonic Synthesizer Programmer which stores 16 patches per voice.

Oberheim only made about 800 of these between 1974-79, finding one in this almost mint condition is rare to almost nonexistent.

This particular Oberheim was owned by music & composer genius Gil Melle, composer of more than 120 famous film scores from
The Andromeda Strain,
Six Million Dollar Man, Killdozer, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The Ultimate Warrior and many many more (google Gil Melle movie scores).

You will be the second owner of this incredible and rare instrument.

Gil was a perfectionist and was probably one of the few composers who really understood this amazing instrument, he was in constant contact with Tom Oberheim on how to maximize this unique synthesizer, consequently, with Tom Oberheim's guidance 10 toggle switches were added, there functions are as follows... (please see photo of the programmer section showing toggle switches) While there were 800 of these built, this is likely the only one in existence with this modification!

The first four toggle switches control oscillator 2 to modulate oscillator 1 on each SEM (VCO1 modulation switch must be set to "ext").
The next four toggle switches connect each SEM to the CV/Gate jacks on the back panel.
The last two switches, do the above in pairs (SEMs 1&2, 3&4).

This has just come from one of the countries leading experts on Oberheims, has had a complete restoration job...
Work completed as follows...

Oberheim 4-Voice #131
All modules: replace bypass caps, clean pots & switches.
Power supply: install standard power socket.
Keyboard; clean contacts; replace bushings.
SEM1: replace VCO1&2 timing caps.
SEM2: replace VCO1 timing cap.
SEM3: replace VCO1&2 timing caps.
Keyboard module: repair overhead board, 2 channel boards.
Programmer module: replace battery; repair demux CVs on front panel; repair overhead board & 2 channel boards.
Tune & scale SEMs, keyboard module, programmer CVs.

A couple of minor repairs were not able to be completed due to the parts not being available. They do not effect the over all functionality and would consider this instrument to be 99.9% perfect.

They are as follows:
Lamps 1, 6, 7, 8 on the programmer are out (but the switches do work perfectly)
The VCF modulation envelope on the Programmer module that connects to SEM3 is not working, however the SEM3 works perfectly."

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