First Impression of the Roland Juno-106 Plugin Synthesizer

SYNTH ANATOMY uses affiliation & partner programs (big red buttons) to finance a part of the activity. If you use these, you support the website. Thanks! 

Last week, Roland released the Roland Cloud v.4 with three new plugin Synthesizers. One of these is an accurate emulation of the Juno-106 Synthesizer. My impression is ambivalent due of different reason. First of all, I must  gratulate the company for such a good emulation of an old classic instrument. The sound quality is very high and it can emulate the authentic Juno-106 sound perfectly. Pad presets sounds lovely but also other presets are great. The negative points for me personal are: the GUI, the CPU workflow and the subscription model.
















I love good designed GUI but unfortunately the Juno-106 and all other plugins from Roland come with the same graphical problem. If you raise the percentage of the GUI, the interfaces becomes messy and not beautiful at all. I hope a lot that Roland update their plugins with a vector based GUI like we saw it in the past at the Arturia plugins. Further, the CPU workflow is very high compared to the main competitors on the market. Pressing no keys, the plugin consume near 20% and that is in my opinion to much for an new developed plugin. The main competitor U-NO-LX from TAL doesn’t consume that amount of CPU and has a near same high-quality. I hope a lot that Roland will release also here an update to improve the CPU workflow. 

Last but not least, the Roland Juno-106 Plugin is only available in the Roland Cloud subscription model which I don’t love because it’s not clever for people who want only this plugin and not the other products. Also the price of the subscription plan is in my eyes to high because it cost you 20€ per month to rent the plugin and not buy it. If you stop paying for it, you can’t using it anymore because you don’t own the plugin. Subscription models for products like Photoshop I can understand because in this case, users receive weekly new updates and bugfixes. I hope a lot that Roland will change their financial model and release the plugin also a standard download product without the Roland Cloud. It would be clever to offer both options. 
Check out here my first impression video about the Roland Juno-106 Plugin Synthesizer. Many sound demos are included and don’t forget to subscribe to the Synth Anatomy channel for more future videos. Big thanks for your support in advance.

2 Comments

  1. I agree with a lot of your comments, but remember this is true analogue circuit emulation, almost identical signal path to the originals and same via an Oscilloscope too. U-he Diva and others also consume a high CPU but not quite to the same extent. I like the subscription model but only to end up becoming a purchase not and endless payment where you don't pay anything, also it's not like there is a big library of other plugins. I think they'll have to rethink that payment model.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


*