Roland’s answer to half a decade of hard-to-program synthesizers: JD-800. It’s smothered in sliders that act as dedicated editors exactly like a classic analog synth, the JD-800 is an extremely programmable and hands-on digital synthesizer. It also happens to be an interesting and great sounding digital synth with incredible flexibility and control. Internal ROM based waveforms are combined to build your sounds. Roland JD-800’s sounds are based on Roland's D-50, but improved for the nineties with a few multimode filters – not very common but definitely welcome at the time. Not like the classic synths that were in wood cases, the JD-800 was in a kind of cheap plastic case and didn’t look very good. Programming is too difficult for most but once you know what to, pretty much any sound you can dream up can be dialed in and stored.

It's used by William Ørbit, Emerson Lake & Palmer, 808 State, Ken Ishii, Astral Projection, Rabbit in the Moon, Depeche Mode, Underworld, Tangerine Dream, LTJ Bukem, Apollo 440, Jean Michel Jarre, ATB, Vangelis, Pet Shop Boys, Faithless, Luke Vibert, Mouse on Mars, Laurent Garnier, MC Hammer, Bushflange, Genesis, and Eat Static.

Specifications

* Polyphony - 24 voices

* Oscillators - ROM based digital synthesizer

* #Instruments - 6 part multitimbral

* Keyboard - 61 key keyboard with velocity

* Arpeg/Seq - NO

* Control - MIDI

* Date Produced - 1991-93

* Est. Value - $1,450