In his latest video, synthesist Starsky Carr offers a head-to-head comparison between the classic Roland Jupiter-8 and the new UDO Super 8.
“Is the UDO Super 8 a modern-day take on the Roland Jupiter-8?” asks Carr.
Check out the video and share your thoughts in the comments!
Didn’t he say one of the two cost multiple times the cost of the other one? I didn’t hear him discuss that later.
Roland Jupiter-8s go for 20k+ on Reverb:
https://reverb.com/marketplace?query=Roland+Jupiter-8&product_type=keyboards-and-synths
The prices for old synths now reflects their rarity and desirability as much as their capabilities as instruments. There just are are a lot of Jupiter-8s around, and there are a lot more people into synths than there were 40 years ago.
So, Carr is demonstrating how the Super-8 is a great synth if you want classic Jupiter-8 sounds, and can do a lot more. At the end of the day, though, there are always small differences with the original synths and some people will pay more to get the original.
I believe that some people don’t appreciate what, in example, I would love Jupiter 8 for. And for me Jupiter has perfect balance of two things that are associated with Roland. And from videos on internet – they are not possible to replicate. I mean: I remember video about shaping PolyBrute to Jupiter timbre via newly added macros, and most people were convinced that it was 100% hit. For me, though, I could hear the difference, because for me there is one quality of the filter’s sound, that I love so much. It doesn’t show in most spectrograms, because it is rooted not only in frequency domain, but also in time domain, and it lays in the texture. In modern synths this quality was replicated in Korg Prologue, which I own exactly for that reason. In some ways: Summit is almost there.
About the spectrograms, there was great example in video by Instruo, for… DAPF? Dual All Pass Filter? If my memory serves me well. Every one can hear the difference, despite the frequency sweeps come out in spectrogram as almost static, to the limits of fluctuations. What I hear in old Roland synths is difference of similar kind – not exactly same, different for important reasons, but it was about perceived difference vs “scientific method”.
One more quality are envelopes. And I tell that as someone who was biased against this point. In early years of learning about synths, I never thought about importance of envelope shapes, treating them as minute details to almost final sound. Until I experienced Roland’s envelopes in System 540 module, at which point their importance moved far up.
Cheers!
I was damn impressed with the UDO. If I were to get a polysynth that was Jupiter adjacent in sound and function, I’d go with that. Very cool.