This is the latest addition to my ever-growing fleet of old analog synths: a 1983-vintage Roland JX-3P analog polysynth. I snagged this guy with the hard-to-find PG200 knob programmer dealie for just $350, and besides one wanky key, everything works peachy. As JX-3P's didn't originally come with the programmer, out of the box, sound editing was done by selecting a parameter number and moving a single slider, DX7-style. Y-to-the-uck. But Roland would sell you the PG200 controller, which offered knob control of all sound parameters. Being the proud owner of both, I was surprised to learn the programmer is affixed to the top of the synth via magetic strips. High-tech!

People tend to honk on about how DCO's sound inferior to VCO's (that's digitally-controlled oscillators vs. voltage-controlled oscillators), because digitally control makes the tuning too precise, and I guess they're sort of right- I own an even older Roland Jupiter-4, and it's tuning certainly stretches the boundaries of warm. But it's not bad- the JX is still plenty "warm" sounding

The JP-4 is a raunchier sounding synth, and the sound parameters tend to have a more extreme range. But the JX-3P has two more voices of polyphony, and more importantly is a dual-oscillator synth, so that adds a lot. And it retains the famous Roland chorus, which frequently turns decent sounds into killer sounds. The only really annoying WTF-were-they-thinking aspect for me is the omission of pulse width and pulse-width modulation- the oscillators just have a non-modulatable square or thin pulse wave. Grrr... the JX-3P would SO cool if it had 'em. OTOH, for the price, it's probably the best bargain going in old polysynth world.