NSD A legendary 90's synth

[Aleksi]

Picked up a Roland JV-1080 with two expansion boards! According to the serial number, this unit just turned 30 years old this month. The display is pristine and everything seems to work fine.

I had a quick audition with headphones and this thing sounds incredible! 64 voices, 16 part multitimbral, general midi support, a whopping 8Mb of sample memory and a 66 Mhz 32-bit processor!

It has three demo songs you can play to hear what this thing can do! You can also audition patches by pressing the volume knob.

 

[FuzzyAce]

Very nice! Hope you get some good years out of it.
Before you know it, you'll be totally surrounded by outboard gear and synths.

 

[Aleksi]

Very nice! Hope you get some good years out of it.
Before you know it, you'll be totally surrounded by outboard gear and synths.

I'm just trying figure out where to put this thing I may also have another rack mount synth in my sights

 

[Aleksi]

Programming this thing is amazing. I'm just figuring stuff out by trial and error and I think I kind of understand the envelopes now I actually enjoy figuring this stuff out! It's got a really good multi-effector as well with pitch fx and hexa-choruses etc.

How this has a better reverb than 90% of built-in reverbs these days I have no idea

 

[TJontheRoad]

A classic

 

[maguchi]

Aah man, that's the shit! Congrats, nice piece. Those were and probly still are a highly prized piece of gear. I miss the days when you could buy a synth or sampler module and hook it up to your keyboard controller. Nowadays if you want additional sounds for your keyboard you can only get outboard sounds as online downloads. The idea of loading online software into hardware just leaves me flat. And I'm not tech savvy enough to deal with that neither.

 

[Aleksi]

Aah man, that's the shit! Congrats, nice piece. Those were and probly still are a highly prized piece of gear. I miss the days when you could buy a synth or sampler module and hook it up to your keyboard controller. Nowadays if you want additional sounds for your keyboard you can only get outboard sounds as online downloads. The idea of loading online software into hardware just leaves me flat. And I'm not tech savvy enough to deal with that neither.

I got this locally for a decent price, reverb and ebay prices tend to be a bit high and the expansion boards are relatively expensive. Some of the buttons have gone stiff but otherwise these are built super well! I feel like this has far higher output than my newer synths, it clips my line mixer pretty easily on some patches

There are some 19" rack mountable desktop modules available these days, I have a Korg multi/poly and a wavestate. I have a fairly nice MIDI keyboard and limited space, so I'll just stack rack units as high as I can.

 

[maguchi]

There are some 19" rack mountable desktop modules available these days, I have a Korg multi/poly and a wavestate.

Way cool! Thanks for the info. I looked up the Korg Multi/Poly, Wavestate, Opsix and Wavetable. How do you like the Multi/Poly and Wavestate and what are some of the highlights and diffrences between those two? Also if you know about the Korg Opsix and Wavetable what do you think about those? Do you know if any brands other than Korg have rackmount synths or samplers out currently? Sorry for the barrage of questions, but I had a flashback to '80s and '90s keyboards and modules .

 

[Aleksi]

Way cool! Thanks for the info. I looked up the Korg Multi/Poly, Wavestate, Opsix and Wavetable. How do you like the Multi/Poly and Wavestate and what are some of the highlights and diffrences between those two? Also if you know about the Korg Opsix and Wavetable what do you think about those? Do you know if any brands other than Korg have rackmount synths or samplers out currently? Sorry for the barrage of questions, but I had a flashback to '80s and '90s keyboards and modules .

I really like the Korgs! The multipoly is a crazy modeled analog, wavetable and waveshaper synth and the wavestate is a multisample based synth with a pretty unique ability to sequence samples. They complement each other really well!

The opsix is a pretty well regarded FM synth (and I want one!) and the modwave is a wavetable synth, which probably has too much overlap with the multipoly for my needs.

Some companies make rack mountable synths, but I think the trend is to make desktop modules that can be racked, so there's a larger front panel and they're less deep.

Rack is back!