We got a short time with extremely busy David Ahlund and the Roland System-8, the new ACM modeled poly synth with three plug out slots. It will ship with two of these slots filled with the Jupiter 8 and the Juno 106 - which we think will actually have 8 voices due to the new and more powerful custom DSP chip inside. We also found out that additional Plug-outs can be stored and recalled from SD card (slot on the back) meaing you can have a wider range of plug-outs without the need of a computer to load them.

We also hear that it will run existing System-1 Plug-Outs, though only in mono mode, if thats what they were designed as.

More news on the split/layer, its not dynamically allocated, so you will get two four voice machines, not 1 and 7 or whatever.

The step sequencer (up to 4 bars long) will let you record parameter changes (number to be confirmed) like the JD-Xi and JD-XA for dynamic parameter changes.

We are hoping to get out hands on one as soon as possible.

We think, that it will be retailing at 1499 Euros so perhaps £1200 ish in the UK

Roland Social

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