Quote:
Originally Posted by ReaDave
I have a Roland Cloud subscription with the first twelve months free. I entered a photo competition Roland ran last year where they wanted good photos of vintage Roland gear. I have a room full of Roland vintage gear so I jumped on the opportunity.
It turns out Roland actually received a lot of good entries so they ended up giving everyone who made submissions a free twelve month subscription.
I also have a System 8 hardware synth and some of the physical hardware synths that Roland based their plugouts on. Also in my studio are two Boutique JP08 synths.
That puts me in a position to do some comparisons between the Cloud instruments, the vintage hardware and the new hardware. I'll be doing some detailed YouTube comparison videos soon.
The first comparison I did was between my Juno 106, which I did a full restoration on ( including properly repairing the voice chips as per my three part blog article) and also gave it a full factory calibration, and my System 8 with its Juno 106 plugout.
I used to work as an authorized Roland service tech around 25 years ago so I am very familiar with the innards of many of the vintage synths now popular again.
I have to say, Roland got the plugout spot on. It sounds identical to my ears and I've been playing Juno synths since 1984.
(...)
|
Wow ! Hi ReaDave. That's extraordinary to hear your comparison from someone who actually has the original hardware to compare with. I've been listening to 808/909 based music since the early 90's and immediately noticed "the sound" that is so distinctive.
I've been doing some more research. It's OK if you've been following Roland's news releases from the beginning but I've come to this very recently. So I did not know that Roland originally partnered with Virtual Sonics - now Roland Virtual Sonics - in Seattle ...
That's Julian Soule, brother of major video game music musician
Jeremy Soule. I found a couple of examples of their original job postings to find their software engineers,
here and
here. Here is Suole's
statement about Roland Cloud on his Facebook page. Here is his
Youtube,
Twitter. Of course the cloud subscription model is not unheard of. Adobe, Autodesk and many others now. The closest music one to Roland's that I can find is
from Sounds Online but, AFAIK it does not include any cumulative ownership plan.
Would love to see some more background to the development and marketing.
So yes it all looks like a big winner. I'm breaking myself in slowly to various instruments as its a bit like going from having an old mini metro to a warehouse of super cars overnight (am I dreaming?). I definitely plan to pay the first month after my initial trial month runs out.