knolan wrote:Phollop Willing PA wrote:I just spent an hour demoing the new Roland Jupiter 80 and my impression in the limited time I spent is that it sounded thin in a digital way and was uninspiring.
Thin? What do you mean by that? None of the demos or reviews indicate th JP80 to be thin. They tend to lean in the opposite way even with the VA side of it. To my ears none of the demos I've hears sound 'thin'.
Could you expand on this. It sounds more like you didn't like it; rather than it being actually 'thin' which suggests it's sonically weak. But if you've picked up on something it'd be worth hearing about.
Sure - I was expecting a warmer closer to analogue sound when I first turned it on, but it immediately reminded me of what my JP 8000 sounded like (without all the layering arps, 'bell & whistles' etc.). Hence the comparison. I was using headphones to demo, supplied by the music store.
I also felt some sonic similarities with the MC 505 that I also own. By comparison, my Korg M3 sounds organic, to my ears.
I thought, I would get lost in sonic pleasure when I demoed it, being such a high end piece of kit, but in all honesty, after about 1/2 hour, I couldn't wait to get away from it, yet I persevered for another bit of time, trying to locate interesting hits and percussion sounds as well as textural fx patches.
I only demoed the knob functions whilst in a patch. I always liked the d-beam anyway. I tried to layer different patches, and experiment with them also, to some success. Most of the sounds (if not all) I played seem to be sample based.
For the record, I like the JP 8000 and would not sell it.
Please, for gosh sakes, take this review with a bit of salt as I am not a professional reviewer or critic and try one yourself, but those are my cursory impressions and please consider that I only played it for less than a hour if that.
I'd be interested in what others think once people get their hands on it.
My honest to gut feeling is that it's not going to be a winner especially when the Kronos seems to do more for less, which I hope to demo soon...