West Coast and East Coast synthesis have argued with each other for fifty years. East Coast, the Moog lineage, builds sound by subtracting: an oscillator, a low-pass filter, a keyboard telling it what note to play. West Coast, the Buchla lineage, builds sound by folding and warping a wave until the harmonics do something a filter never could, patched by hand, often with no keyboard in sight at all. Most synths pick a side. Vannes Devices just built a desktop box that refuses to.
Obsidian, the company's newly previewed semi-modular analog synth, runs a West Coast-style oscillator section, waveshaping, wavefolding, cross-modulation, into a filter section that behaves more like an East Coast subtractive stage, except it does not snap between low-pass, high-pass and band-pass. It morphs continuously between them under CV control, so the filter itself becomes a modulation source rather than a fixed gate the signal passes through. That is the actual pitch here: not a spec sheet, a synthesis argument, resolved inside one chassis.
Who is actually behind this?
Vannes Devices is Koen Pepping's company, and Obsidian is personal in a specific way: it is the first instrument he has built entirely himself since starting Vannes Engineering in 2017. Before that he co-founded and co-owned Majella Audio, so this is not a newcomer chasing a trend, it is a veteran designer's solo debut after nearly a decade running his own outfit quietly in the background. Synthtopia flagged the preview on August 5, and it has since circulated through MatrixSynth, Synth Anatomy and Gearspace, the usual chain for a design this specific to actually reach the people who will care.
What does the rest of the instrument do?
Beyond oscillators and filter, Obsidian packs envelope generators, an LFO and a tape-style delay into the same desktop footprint, with a patch-oriented, performance-focused interface built around hands-on control rather than menu diving. The sequencer is the other West Coast tell: it is not a generic 8- or 16-step grid, it is a 4- or 5-step selectable sequence with external and manual reset, the kind of odd-length, glitch-friendly structure that Buchla-descended gear favors over the rigid bar-length loops East Coast boxes assume.
"A unique semi-modular analog synthesizer with its own characteristic sound" is how Vannes itself frames Obsidian, and the combination of philosophies is the whole point rather than a footnote.
Vannes says the instrument is now nearing its final prototype form, though price and a release window remain unannounced. For a company on its first fully self-made release, that caution tracks: this is a design being finished properly rather than rushed to a launch date.
Why does the East/West split still matter?
Because it shapes how a synth wants to be played, not just what it sounds like. An East Coast box invites you to sit at a keyboard and play parts; a West Coast box invites you to patch it into something semi-chaotic and ride the result. Obsidian trying to hold both at once, in one desktop unit, is a genuine design bet, and it is exactly the kind of instrument that ends up on studio desks belonging to producers who care as much about synthesis architecture as they do about the sound that comes out.
