Roland JV-80

There's not a lot of information out there about the JV-80, it's basically known as the precursor to the hugely popular Super JV/XP series of Roland ROMplers/workstations (and then XV, which turned into Fantom) and that's about it.  I've had the rack version (JV-880) and one of the keyboard variations (JV-90) for a while now so I thought I'd share some information about these synths and what they're good for.  They are fairly capable synthesizers that are often overlooked as just simple ROMplers.

Origins

Roland's first digital synth, the D-50, was released in 1987.  It was a very good sounding synth that was capable of covering digital and analog type sounds.  They designed a couple other synths with this technology (the MT-32, and D-5, 10, 20, 110) while at the same time they introduced some semi-pro ROMplers (the U series).  These ROMplers were just that, very simple single voice ROM playback instruments with no filter.  Their next step was developing what was to be their top of the line U series, the U-50.  This synth was basically a U series x4 voices plus filters, so now approaching the synthesizing depth of the D-50.  Hearing that the D-50 was still selling quite well, they decided at the last minute to call it the D-70.  Unfortunately it was plagued by unnecessarily complicated interface and poor documentation.

The D-70 not being that successful, they took the technology and experimented with a couple of different directions.

Roland D Synths

So no one really knows what “Linear Arithmetic Synthesis” is.  Roland never fully explains it, perhaps so it's specs couldn't be easily compared to competing digital synths.  As far as the user is concerned all parameters are like a standard subtractive synth, but underneath I think the sound is being generated by putting sine waves together additively or maybe using FM.  All the filter is doing is individually fading out harmonics as the LPF goes down.  This also might be why the resulting wave is so quiet when the filter is all the way down because it actually continues fading out the fundamental instead of just stopping at a perfect sine wave.

On paper the D-10 (and others with the same sound engine such as the D-20, D-5, and D-110) and the D-50 seem very comparable.  And actually, the MT-32, D-110, and D-550 all use the same tone generator (LA32 on all except pre-'88 D-550s that used a functionally identical older chip) and D/A converter (Burr Brown PCM54) on the output.  But in sound there is no comparison.  The difference is they are all implemented in greatly different ways.  They all have different CPUs and program data, and they all have different analog output circuitry.

In my personal subjective opinion the D-50 is an excellent sounding synth.  It is one of Roland's great pad machines capable of thick massive whooshing wall-of-sound pads.  However, the interface is one of the worst synth interfaces of all time.  You can understand it just fine if you put the time into it, but the tiered menu system creates a painful working situation of constantly backing in and out of menus just to adjust a few parameters.  The whole process becomes extremely masochistic.  If you have access to a software editor it's worth it, otherwise forget it.  The D-10 with the cheap PG-10 programmer is a fairly workable situation.  The sound quality is fairly poor though.  It consistently sounds almost distorted with a metallic ring to all the sounds.  I much prefer the Yamaha 4-Op FM synths, at least you can dress them up with processing to sound pretty good.

BOSS PH-2 Super Phaser Demo