INDEX / ABOUT
Two studios, one standard.
OSCILLA is fourteen people across two benches, one in Berlin and one in Detroit. We design, machine, assemble, calibrate, and support everything we sell in those two rooms. There is no contract manufacturer, no third-party support line, and no department between you and the person who built your module.
It started with a broken multimeter.
In 2019, two engineers who had spent a decade designing test equipment for other people bought a broken vintage multimeter at a flea market in Kreuzberg. Inside it was a discrete current source so beautifully built that neither of them could stop thinking about it. Both of them happened to own modular synths. The question that started the company was almost a joke: what would a synth sound like if it were built to the tolerance of a bench multimeter?
The answer took two years, one garage, and a burned-out voltage reference to find. The first prototype oscillator held 0.2% across a studio day, which is terrible by our current standard and astonishing for a garage. More importantly, when we patched four of them together and played a chord, the chord moved in a way none of us had heard from new hardware. We had accidentally built the drift conversation this whole site is about.
The first production batch was eleven modules, sold to eleven people whose names we still have. Eight of those units are registered in our support system today, seven years later, on their original boards. The company exists to keep that sentence getting longer.
BY THE NUMBERS
- Founded
- 2019, Berlin
- People
- 14 across two studios
- First batch
- 11 units, March 2021
- Units shipped
- 41,300+
- Countries served
- 43
- Instruments in service
- 96% of units ever sold
- Owned by
- The founders and the employee pool
- Outside capital
- None. We intend to keep it that way
Seven years, six decisions.
The flea market multimeter
A broken bench multimeter in Kreuzberg provides both the question and the standard. The company does not exist yet; the argument does.
Garage prototype one
First discrete oscillator core holds 0.2% over a studio day. Not shippable, but the drift character is unmistakable, and the standard gets set at four decimals precisely because the prototype made us want it.
First production batch
Eleven units, built in a shared machine shop, each calibrated by hand and shipped with a hand-typed certificate. Batch 2021-01 remains in our records as the most stressful month of anyone's life who was there.
Detroit opens
A second bench opens in Detroit to cut transatlantic shipping in half for North American service. The two studios argue about everything and calibrate identically, which becomes the company's founding joke.
Schematics go public
Every schematic, service manual, and line of firmware is published under open licenses. Sales accelerate, which we did not predict, and the support load drops, which we really did not predict.
HELIOS-8 development begins
The flagship starts as a request from the community: build a polyphonic voice that respects the standard. Twenty-two months of development, four prototype revisions, and one firmware rewrite later, it ships.
Batch 24 ships
The catalog reaches eight modules, the field fleet crosses 41,000 units, and the first internal QC report goes public in the lab notes. The standard survives contact with scale, which was the whole test.
Fourteen people. Six of them bench-certified.
Every OSCILLA instrument carries the initials of the person who calibrated it, stamped on the certificate. These are the people whose initials you have been collecting.
A. Vasquez
Oscillator cores and the calibration engine. Keeps the reference oven warmer than any sane person keeps a kitchen. Signs certificates with AV.
J. Okafor
Mechanical design, panels, and the machine shop. Measures everything twice and publishes the measurement. Signs certificates with JO.
M. Lindqvist
Wrote the first line of OSCILLA firmware and most lines since. Responsible for the three drift modes and the honest lie detector. Signs with ML.
D. Whitfield
Runs the batch bench and writes the QC reports in the lab notes. Has rejected exactly one batch in four years and publishes the reason every time. Signs with DW.
R. Tanaka
Answers every support message that arrives, in the order it arrived, usually within one business day. Has read the firmware more recently than anyone. Signs with RT.
S. Brandt
Draws the faceplates and writes the manuals. Insists that a panel is a wiring diagram you can touch, and has been proven right twice. Signs with SB.
The two benches.
BERLIN / KREUZBERG
Design, core production, and the lab
Seven people, one CNC mill, one calibration chamber held at 23.0 degrees, and the bench where every new circuit starts. The lab hosts the bench demo program on Fridays: two hours, one module of your choice, coffee provided by a machine we service ourselves in keeping with the company religion.
- Address
- Ohlauer Str. 24, 10999 Berlin, Germany
- Hours
- Mon to Fri, 09:00 to 17:00 CET
- Bench demos
- Fridays by appointment
DETROIT / CORKTOWN
Production, QC, and North American service
Seven people, one CNC mill, the batch QC bench, and the service bench where every North American warranty repair happens. The QC reports in the lab notes are written here. The building was a tool and die shop until 2019, which we consider destiny.
- Address
- 1400 Michigan Ave, Detroit, MI 48216, USA
- Hours
- Mon to Fri, 09:00 to 17:00 ET
- Bench demos
- Fridays by appointment
“The most boring, most trustworthy spec sheets in the industry. OSCILLA publishes the number that survives a subpoena, and their competitors publish the number that survives a demo.”EDITORIAL / MODULAR QUARTERLY / ISSUE 18
“I sent my eight-year-old module back for a routine check. It came back with a note from the person who serviced it, the measurement deltas, and a new certificate. I have bought nothing else since.”CUSTOMER LETTER / PUBLISHED WITH PERMISSION / 2025-11
We started OSCILLA because we kept buying modules that were almost right, and the gap between almost right and right was never magic. It was always a measurement nobody published or a corner someone cut on a part nobody would open the module to check. So we wrote down the rule that still runs the company: if we would not stake the warranty on the sentence, the sentence does not go on the site.
Seven years in, the rule has cost us more than it has earned us on paper. It has also built the only thing this industry cannot fake, which is a customer base that reads the batch sheet before it reads the marketing, and forwards the batch sheet to a friend instead of the marketing. That friend is the entire growth strategy, and it is slower than a funding round and better than one.
If you buy from us, you are not buying our taste. You are buying our measurements, our willingness to be corrected in public, and a bench in Berlin or Detroit that answers email. The sound is yours to make.
A. VASQUEZ & J. OKAFOR / BERLIN, OCTOBER 2026
- Rule 01
- Every number traceable to a measurement or a policy
- Rule 02
- Corrections publish where the mistake was made
- Rule 03
- The bench answers email, always a person
- Rule 04
- Batch dates printed, never promised
- Rule 05
- Nothing we sell is locked
Everything we can. Hardware files under CERN-OHL-S, firmware history in full, the rig calibration log, the batch sheets, the warranty service numbers, and the arguments that lost. What stays internal is narrow and boring: individual customer correspondence, employee records, and supplier pricing, which is ours to negotiate and yours to never hear about.
Transparency is not a mood. It is a list, and this is the list.
- Published
- Schematics, PCB files, panel drawings, firmware, rig logs, batch sheets, service stats, release receipts
- Not published
- Customer correspondence, supplier pricing, employee records
- Where
- This site and the public repository, both versioned