Thursday, January 31, 2013

Received a Juno-106 the other day.  Traded an Ambika with a return customer for it.  Man what a fantastically awesome synth.  A friend loaned me his Juno-60 for a couple months a bit ago and I absolutely fell in love with it.  I could not bring myself to shell out over $1000 for a 60 though, then this offer was put up and I had to jump on it.  While I would prefer to get a 60, the 106 is pretty damned close.  I have read a lot of critisim that it doesn't sound as "warm" or "fat", which I get, but honestly, it's such a subtle difference.  Now, the one big thing I learned and wasn't happy with is the sliders are sending MIDI messages to the voices rather than CV, so when I do a filter sweep with the cutoff, I can hear the "stepping".  I was really bummed when I heard this.  But, I did find that using the Bender to sweep the cutoff is CV control.  Nice and smooth.  Granted I can't get super smooth with the bender, but whatever.  I just ordered some African Blackwood end caps for it.  That should look pretty kickass.  Next I'll get a clear bender and add some red LED's behind it.  Lastly I'll look into swapping out the filters transistors with the ones used on the 60.  I've read that has a huge impact on the filter coloring, since the voices are basically the exact same design as the 6/60.  Funny enough though, I did have to do a little minor work to it, even though it had been to a repair shop twice in the past 6 months.  The Level switch had a bad solder joint.  Thankfully nothing major, but, this is why I love analog gear.  Always something to fix.