INTRO

I acted like a fool and broke my rule again – I bought a freshly released synth. Regret came instantly. How many times do I have to go through this again? I’m a sucker-for-synths.

The TEO-5 comes with no parameter value display on the screen. This is so inconvenient, especially whenever I want to know the original value of a parameter, or current value of hard-to-judge parameters (like Delay Time). The sequencer messes up sequence length if the last step is a rest or a tie. The random LFOs sound as if they repeated a set of fixed values instead of being truly random. Bugs or features?

On top of software flaws, my unit arrived with hardware defects. The synth suffered from frequent ghost editing. I believe the knobs have now cleaned or lubricated themselves up by simply being tweaked for several hours. Thank You Lord.

The other issue was not so easy to fix. One of the keys had a totally different response from all the others. I opened the synth up and discovered that a rubber piece under the culprit key was deformed. It was blocking the full travel distance of the key. The rubber needed to be dismantled and the deformation needed to be chiselled into correct shape. I’ve seen a couple of complaints of the same nature over the internet right after the first batches of the TEO-5 had been shipped. I have experience disassembling synths, but I don’t think many people are eager to open their brand-new machines up, so I’m guessing the TEO-5 had a higher-than-average rate of returns.

Lesson learned yet again: it makes little sense to buy brand-new synths before some time has passed and all the quality issues have been ironed out and a new bug-fixing firmware has been rolled out. Let’s practice some patience and let other customers be the free beta-testers, if they so desire. The million dollar question is: will I put this lesson into practice next time?;)

PHASE 1: BAD UI

Judging by the looks it was safe to assume the Oberheim TEO-5 was going to be a “knobby” kind of synth, so the fact that there were no oscillator level knobs on the front panel was a shocker. Oscillator levels can only be adjusted via menu or with certain shortcut combinations.

What is the shortcut for adjusting the oscillator levels? It’s [oscillator button] + [value knob]. And where are those buttons? No, not in the mixer section, as there is no mixer section on the TEO-5. They’re in the filter section!

The other thing that is conspicuous by its absence on TEO’s front panel is the “pan spread” feature. It’s also missing from the menu! So where is it? You have to program it in the matrix. Sheesh…

Oh, and did I mention that your current waveform button cannot be untoggled unless you toggle a different waveform?  This synth has some very quirky design choices. Was it necessary or justified for Oberheim to stay loyal to their 1970’s design in this respect? Behringer did the same with the UB-Xa (no mixer, just full volume or half volume for the oscillators). There seems to be a strong nostalgia thing going on in the Oberheim domain…

The last issue nagging me is the keybed which comes with only 44 keys. Four octaves like in the OB-6 / Prophet-6 / Trigon-6 would be so much better. Oberheims are known for their pad sounds and 44 keys make it quite difficult to play pads. The recently announced (June 2025) module version of the TEO-5 makes more sense in this respect.

PHASE 2: GOOD UI

But if you can get used to the interface of PPG / Behringer Wave, it means you can get used to any quirks on any UI – it’s just a matter of time. Even if the TEO-5 has some of its buttons in weird places, and even if it has some of its features hidden in a menu, it’s still a comfortable layout that is much better executed than some of the other synths out there. In the rare instances when menu diving is needed, it’s as painless and as logically arranged as it can be. Every manufacturer should treat the Sequential school of menu / matrix organizing as the gold standard. If you’ve edited the Behringer UB-Xa, you’ll certainly appreciate that on the TEO-5 you don’t have to play games like “rotate-push-go-back-to-fix-your-value” with the UB-Xa’s rotary encoder.

PHASE 3: BAD SOUND

After I’ve mastered the panel I started to play around with my TEO-5 in a more confident manner, but several days passed and the synth wasn’t bringing me joy or excitement. Quite the opposite – I was becoming increasingly frustrated. There was something wrong with it in more than one area. Something rubbed my ears the wrong way, so to speak.

Many times the presets I was coming up with produced ugly clicks and I wasn’t able to locate the source of these clicks (or crackles?). I felt the delays were boring (mono) while the “emulations of the legendary” flangers / phasers sounded grotesque and unusable in a lot of modern contexts. The oscillators would “choke” in sync mode (just like my Moog Muse on its first, under-developed / beta firmware). I was also under the impression the envelopes had an unnatural, abrupt slope.

I’m not even tackling the issue of how saturated / overdriven the synth sounds in its default state because it seems to be the norm today for a lot of synths (at least for Sequential’s design). Keeping the patch level below 100 makes it sound okay, but relatively quiet. Putting it above 100 raises the volume to an acceptable level, but it oversaturates the timbre.

Having played the TEO-5 for a couple of weeks, all my observations gave me the impression that the synth sounded “tense” / “unresponsive” / “2d” instead of “3d”, if you know what I mean. It was very uninspiring for me to just “jam”, tweaking the sound on the fly. This was in total opposition to some other Oberheim / Sequential synths, like the OB-6 or Prophet-6, which sound relatively cool / vibrant / dynamic / expressive in an instant. All the five voices of the TEO-5 blended into one big mush. And the more keys I pressed (the more voices I used), the more of an ugly buzz surfaced in my audio monitors. I had the same kind of feeling with my TAKE-5, which seems to be using the same oscillator design as TEO-5.

PHASE 4: GOOD SOUND(s)

This negative experience forced me to try harder and find ways to look at the newcomer in a positive way (it’s an Oberheim after all!) and try to use its unique features to my advantage. I started to treat it more like a programmer’s synth instead of player’s synth. I took a more conscious & calculated approach to the levels, Thru-0 FM and the phenomenal SEM filter, which comes with a pretty high dynamic range. Finally some magic started to appear, and a lot of joy followed. Narrowing my focus down to what works, what is effective – in other words working within TEO-5’s strengths & limits (or simply “getting to know it”) turned out to be very good for the sounds. I really like the little tunes & sequences that I’ve come up on this synth and I’m curious if you’re enjoying them as much. I think the synth really shines in this area.

These cheaper synths have their upside – they are more versatile chameleons, because the tame / compressed sound means that the synth oozes less of its inherent character. You can sort of “put into the sound” the flavors that you want and infuse it with character by applying some mod matrix tricks, for example. You have room for maneuver. The glamorous Trigon-6 / OB-6 don’t have a mod matrix, so it’s much harder to escape their bombastic character and turn them into chameleons. With every twist of a knob the OB-6 screams “I want to be an Oberheim” and sabotages every attempt to be anything else than an Oberheim with a clearly defined, sharp Oberheim tone (despite having a state-variable filter). The TEO-5 is much more cooperative in this area, as its voices behave more like a commune of workers or bees in a hive, as opposed to a group of agitated, high-ego freelance artists.

Bear in mind that what we’re doing here is comparing horses from the same ranch (US West Coast / Sequential), so the TEO-5 is still a very characterful-sounding synth, if only compared to the likes of Novation Peak / Summit, Roland Gaia-2 or Behringer Wave.

By the way, I’ve always dreamed about a mass-market OB-6 / Trigon-6 type of synth with a mod matrix. The longer I live and the more new synth releases I witness, I’m starting to question if that will ever happen. If that is even possible at all, at least below the $5000 mark. Gotta check the Melbourne Delia.

THE DEAL

For the price of $1500 Oberheim is giving you a chance to enter the club. The synth comes with a lot of knobs, aftertouch keyboard and a logical editing structure that has been tested in Sequential’s TAKE-5 – the progenitor synth. And the solid Oberheim sound is there, even if it’s not what you’d expect after playing the OB-X8 or OB-XA (oftentimes it sounds like 5 mono synths playing all at once instead of a polysynth just being a polysynth, if you know what I mean). Still, the sizzly vigour & the ear-pleasing vanilla sheen that the TEO-5 emanates is one of a kind,  It’s “affordable” but still sounds exquisite and gives you flexibility that is above average. I think all of this is enough to make this product objectively fine.

For my part, I’m sitting on the fence. Gotta go the usual Jexus contrarian way and counter the overpowering ecstasy over the TEO-5 that I’ve witnessed on the Internet;) So I’ll say this:

I’ve always longed for a modern Oberheim with a deep engine and broad modulation options. I finally got one and I cherish it. Yet I have this feeling that just won’t go away that the TEO-5 is just a TAKE-5 with a SEM filter instead of the Prophet filter. Same looks, same polyphony, same oscillators, same envelope behavior, same gain staging challenges. If we add the the software / hardware bugginess and the 5-note polyphony to the picture, it gets me thinking if the expense is justified.

But let’s give the TEO-5 the benefit of the doubt and let’s forget about the minor hardware quality issues that might have been purely incidental in my case, and the software bugs that may get fixed in the future. This leaves us with polyphony – the part that is most frustrating. Much more frustrating than in Take-5 (which is also 5-voice!) Why the paradox? I guess it’s because the Oberheim timbre is really cool for strings and pads, but how am I supposed to play strings or pads when half of the notes are suddenly cut off with every new chord that I hit? This is the type of synth that should optimally have 8 voices (6 is absolute minimum!). That’s why, at the end of the day, for me the TEO-5 is more like a bass / lead / seq machine than a pad machine / all-in-one machine, and that’s the point where I’m starting to ponder if the project / expenditure makes sense.

Don’t get me wrong – I rejoice each time I see a new knobby synth being released. I rejoice even more if it’s an Oberheim synth. The opportunity to work with a platform that sports a SEM filter, Thru-0 FM and a deep mod matrix has to be appreciated. But I feel like the TEO-5 is a fruit of compromise that discards, misses or overlooks a few important details, which in turn prevents it from becoming an outstanding, comfortable instrument with a fully-developed potential. Maybe “affordable Oberheim” is an oxymoron? Some things like the oscillator block cannot be replaced. Just change what can be changed – fix the bugs (it’s been almost 2 years since release), give it 8 voices with a proper keybed, make it $400 more expensive if that’s necessary, and I shut my mouth! The Prophet-5 saw the light of day in 1977. It’s been half a century and we’re still at 5 voices?

POSTSCRIPT
Nov 6, 2025

Today Oberheim released a firmware update which allows for poly chaining. For those of you who don’t know – poly chaining is combining several synths to increase the total number of voices. This idea dates back to 1970s where it made sense to connect mono synths, so I don’t have to tell you I’m not a fan of this quaint method. I rather appreciate the Sequential approach to the Prophet-5 where it comes as a “Prophet-10” option. Or any synth that you can open up and install additional voice cards. Buying two TEO-5 modules, owning two TEO-5 modules and managing two TEO-5 modules, if I may paraphrase a classic, is just “entities multiplied beyond necessity”.

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