Discontinued

Forum for JUPITER-80
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kimsnarf
Posts: 275
Joined: 17:55, 4 January 2013
Location: Oslo, Norway

Re: Discontinued

Post by kimsnarf »

moogmaniac wrote:Compared to the Kronos, Rolands support for the Jupiter 80 has been miserable.
Indeed. Roland's lack of support is legendary! On the other hand, all their products are unique. Their contraptions keep their coolness and resale value, unlike the Korg and Yamaha regurgitations. Expect a Montage 2 in a year or two, and a halving of the Montage 1 used price. Kronos is on a similar trajectory.

The lack of a librarian (and even the lack of a MIDI implementation to support a librarian) is the big, black eye on the otherwise polished Jupiter-80. All we have are time-consuming work-arounds. Only Roland could solve this properly and they won't. For those of us who enjoy the presets on this machine, and who prefer to play this synth rather than program it, this is inconvenient, to put it mildly.
Mike-pol
Posts: 28
Joined: 00:37, 29 February 2012

Re: Discontinued

Post by Mike-pol »

If anyone is seriously interested - I have one Jupiter-80 for sale, excellent condition in original box - you can write to me direcetly at: dali11@o2.pl
Regards
Mike
skinmechanic
Posts: 205
Joined: 13:39, 14 June 2004
Location: UK, Leeds
Contact:

Re: Discontinued

Post by skinmechanic »

The problem with the release of the JP80 it was around the time of financial constraints. Their CEO at the time had a different vision for Roland. Although they used the Jupiter name it was marketed not as a retrospective release but a successor to the Jupiter 8. The problem was people wanted real time control, although the interface eventually in V2.0 was easier to navigate the R&D and development costs for the Jupiter line far outweighed sales. This included the JP50 and Integra 7, when the business changed hands it changed direction and offloaded a fair number of developers and R&D was halved. They made a lot of staff in europe and the UK redundant, sold off some of their acquisitions namely cakewalk. Their new roadmap was to make units at a lower price point but what was relevant and this was retro.

I think they have got back to a position they need to be at, high end hardware sales are down compared to 2008 as the market is saturated with new products and certainly with the increase of analogue gear.

I certainly wished they had released a new Jupiter with real-time control to the right where there is lots of space and also update their SuperNatural synth engine to try and reduce the aliasing.
Dewdman42
Posts: 137
Joined: 00:42, 14 January 2013

Re: Discontinued

Post by Dewdman42 »

I just wish they had fixed the after touch before abandoning it. Also if they had given us a library editor. Beyond that it doesn’t need anything else to live on for decades
Vlad_77
Posts: 430
Joined: 18:02, 14 February 2008
Location: The Netherlands

Re: Discontinued

Post by Vlad_77 »

Very sad that Roland abandoned this beautiful instrument. I've been really digging deep into the Synth side of Supernatural. I created a seemingly very simple Liveset for instance that has only one Tone and in that Tone, only two Partials! The sound is freaking huge AND very musically useful. The real beauty though is something Roland never pushed. You can create amazing sounds without tweaking a single parameter. The instrument begs to be layered and split and considering the staggering number of Livesets and Tones and Partials, the number of sounds you can create may not be infinite but it's a HUGE number.

Jupiter 80, Kronos, and Kurzweil are my weapons of choice. GAS satisfied. My only real complaint is that there's not enough spaces left for creating a crap ton of Livesets and Registrations. For an instrument that is a blast to tweak, Roland dropped the ball in terms of storage. Yes, I know that a USB stick solves that, but this is STILL a top of the line synth and I wish it had more initialized Livesets and Registrations.
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