Rack mount synths--Roland...other?

[Legatoboy]

Well I have 2 Roland XV-3080 I would like to sell with a whole bunch of sound cards if anyone is interested ...both in very good condition! I left my 80's project about 2 months ago. .

 

I will probably be posting them on the Garage Sale if I canb finally get around to it but if interested PM me . . .

 

I may hold on to my Blofeld tabletop unit....it's just so unusual in a good way.

[GRollins]

...not only would you need both an Integra7 and V-Synth (which essentially have zero overlap, one being a rompler and the other being a synth), but you even would need the XR as well, as the Fantom sound library is close to non-existent in the Integra-7 as well, despite it also serving rompler functions.

 

If you don't need it to fit in a rack, there are other keyboard-less possibilities...

 

I'm afraid that I'll need to go the rack route, unless I build an outbuilding for my music stuff. I'm cramped and getting cramped-er by the minute.

 

So...it'll take an XR, a V-Synth, and an Integra (which I still say sounds like a car model) to do the Roland thing. I've listened to one quick demo of the XR, but only one (so far)--all other listening time has been for the Integra and V-Synth. To date, I'm still leaning towards the V-Synth, but it'll take some doing for me to justify the price. There's no question that the Integra can do some crazy things (5.1 surround? WTF?), and it's got a screaming blue million voices, but the V-Synth just seems to fit my current mood better. Next month I might come up with a different answer.

 

Or maybe something improbable happens and I win the lottery, at which point maybe I actually could go nab one of each.

 

And I still haven't started on the non-Roland suggestions--need 48 hour days.

 

Grey

[AnotherScott]

If you don't need it to fit in a rack, there are other keyboard-less possibilities...

 

I'm afraid that I'll need to go the rack route, unless I build an outbuilding for my music stuff. I'm cramped and getting cramped-er by the minute.

The Sonic Cell is much smaller than a rack unit, if you have a free surface to sit it on.

[GRollins]

...if you have a free surface to sit it on.

 

No gots.

 

The only way to get more things shoehorned into the available space is to go vertical, meaning rack. That way, I commit the footprint of a single rack, but can stack multiple things vertically. Or, in other words, small ain't necessarily small if it takes up the wrong kind of space.

 

And that's if I can figure out a plan that allows me to get another rack in...right now the rack holding the Edirol & pals is on boxes, which are in turn stacked on a table, which is in the angle of an L comprised of the Hammond and the rack holding the MM8 and Kronos (the Little Phatty is currently on the Hammond's bench--not optimal). This means that I've got to reach through the tubes of the keyboard stand to get to the knobs on the equipment. Awkward, but doable (definitely a 1st world problem and I acknowledge it...I'm immeasurably grateful to have the toys I have). The rack is 8U, of which 7U are filled. If I can locate a cheap 19" Eurorack, then I'd like to mount the D in the rack, too, as it's currently on top and I can't see the knobs--but that means I'll need a bigger rack.

 

Of course, I'll need a bigger rack anyway if I buy Roland (or other) gizmos to add to my collection.

 

Grey

 

EDIT: Something else I need to look for is more tubes and clamp thingies for my Ultimate Support stand. I'm hoping to have the woodwork for my Fatar keyboard done soon and it will need a home, too.

[AnotherScott]

For the record the Integra *does* have the XV5080 soundset but the XR does *not*.

So the 128 mb XR wave set is not a superset of the 64 mb XV5080 wave set, good to know. Is it entirely different? i.e. from a separate sound development team who didn't use any of the XV5080 sound set at all? Or are there still some 5080 sounds in an XR?

I upgraded from a 5080 to a Fantom X8 and as part of that I ported loads of my old sounds over. There's no patch file compatibility between the two despite the nearly-identical architecture due to the differences in wave sets. I can't categorically say that none of the the 5080's waves made it into the X, but if they did I didn't find them!

I may have found another interestng twist here. The FA has the XV-5080 sound set, the Juno DS does not, and I've read that the DS is derived from the Fantom instead (at least the 64 mb that it shares with its predecessor, the Juno DI... which would still be only half of what's in the 128 mb Fantom XR).

 

Here's where it gets more interesting. If you have a Juno DS, you can go to the Axial site and download all the XV-5080 programs, though you can load only one bank of them at a time (out of 8 banks total), which seemed odd to me because the XV-5080 only had 64 mb of data to begin with. Why couldn't they fit the complete XV-5080 sound set into one or two expansions instead of 8? (I believe expansions can hold 32 mb of data compressed, 64 mb uncompressed?) Maybe there's a limit to how many Programs a single expansion can support, regardless of how much or how little wave data is included, so they had to break it up that way...?

 

But it gets weirder... When you download the SRX-based expansions to your computer, you can tell that the files are about 32 mb. But the XV-5080 expansions are only about 150k! Not even close to 1 megabyte! That implies that all the wave data for the XV-5080 sounds (or suffciently similar ones) are already in the DS, even though the XV-5080 patches themselves are not. Unless someone has some other explanation?

 

And if that's true, and if the DS is indeed derived from the Fantom, that means that the Fantom would also include those waves, even if not the acual 5080 programs.

[GRollins]

This is the kind of thing that makes me think that I've fallen down a rabbit hole.

 

Grey

[zephonic]

And if that's true, and if the DS is indeed derived from the Fantom, that means that the Fantom would also include those waves, even if not the acual 5080 programs.

 

 

Yes, the Fantom X includes all the waveforms but not all patches from the XV5080. Roland offers a download that recreates many of the JV2080/XV5080 patches for the Fantom X. I still have those. It's not 100% the same because the Fantom's MFX section is different, but close enough and recognizable for many of the signature patches.

 

 

http://eg.roland.com/support/by_product/fantom-x7/updates_drivers/1735

http://eg.roland.com/support/by_product/fantom-x7/updates_drivers/1736

 

[GRollins]

So...am I understanding this correctly?

 

The voices are in there, you just need to unlock them? A hack, so to speak?

 

I once had a Texas Instruments calculator. In the fullness of time, the adhesive on the aluminum faceplate over the buttons gave up. With the faceplate loose, I took a look underneath. B'gosh and b'gorrah, all the buttons of the next higher model were there, just hidden by blank places on my faceplate. From then on I had a fancier calculator than the one I paid for.

 

Grey

[AnotherScott]

Yes, the Fantom X includes all the waveforms but not all patches from the XV5080. Roland offers a download that recreates many of the JV2080/XV5080 patches for the Fantom X. I still have those. It's not 100% the same because the Fantom's MFX section is different, but close enough and recognizable for many of the signature patches.

 

 

http://eg.roland.com/support/by_product/fantom-x7/updates_drivers/1735

http://eg.roland.com/support/by_product/fantom-x7/updates_drivers/1736

Thanks for those links, very interesting! It's not exactly what you say, though. I downloaded them and looked at the readme, and it says, "Since the Waveform's contents are different between the Fantom-X and the XV Series, previous XV Patches will not sound completely the same on the Fantom-X Series." So it's not (just) the MFX that creates discrepancies. They're saying that the Fantom does not actually include the XV-5080 wave set. So it seems that what they have done is pick similar waveforms to create close approximations.

 

Since the Juno DS is apparently Fantom-based (unlike the XV-5080-based FA), then the Axial XV-5080 downloads for the Juno DS may be these exact same Fantom programs that you linked to... i.e. close recreations of the XV-5080 programs using Fantom waves. Though why these programs require an expansion slot (if they don't require any new wave data) is not entirely clear. It could be merely that there's only space for 256 User programs, and the expansion slot approach allows you to load them in without using up your User space. If that's the case, I wonder if one could load in an XV-5080 expansion library, copy your favorite programs to your User locations, then load in a different expansion library and still have those XV-5080 sounds work. (Normally expansion slot based programs don't work once that expansion is not the one that is loaded, since the waves for those programs would no longer be available.)