The OB-X was used in popular music by Rush (on Moving Pictures and Signals), Nena, Styx member Dennis DeYoung (used frequently from late 1979 to 1984), Queen (on The Game, their first synthesizer on an album), Madonna for her debut album, Prince,[6] and Jean-Michel Jarre who used it for its "brass" sounds.

The OB-X was the first Oberheim synthesizer based on a single printed circuit board called a "voice card" (still using mostly discrete components) rather than the earlier SEM (Synthesizer Expander Module) used in Oberheim semi-modular systems, which had required multiple modules to achieve polyphony.

This made the OB-X less laborious to program, more functional for live performance, and more portable than its ancestors.

[citation needed] The "X" in OB-X originally stood for the number of voice-cards (notes of polyphony) installed.

The entire range used "paddle" levers for pitch and modulation, Oberheim's answer to the "wheel" controls of the Prophet-5.