INTEGRA-7 SRX-Boards for Jupiter-80?

anotherscott wrote:

if you want massive libraries of sound samples, as it sounds like you do, Roland's not going to be for you, because their direction is now toward modeling.

Fair enough, but that 4 SRX limitation makes it a dealbreaker. That and lack of a VST/RTAS editor. At the least, make a Windows and Android editor.

I wouldn't discredit a VST editor just yet -

Adjust the parameters in real time via MIDI, as well as with the dedicated iPad app or VSTi plug-in editor for DAWs such as SONAR.

When discribing the Integra's Motional Surround feature.

That's a plus. I'd still pass. W/o 512 or at least 256 note polyphony, it's not worth it IMO.

I used to bang out extremely complex arrangements w/my XP60 and XV5080. I also remember what it took to get those arrangements.

∙ Crossing my fingers while stripping patches down to one part to avoid polyphony issues (all while praying the patch sounded the same lol, and learning how to make it sound as close as possible given the constraints!).
∙ Walking on Egg Shells when working with piano runs, complex strings parts b/c of polyphony
∙ Only playing back sequences with the correct board installed (on XP/JVs, the wrong patch would play)

I will say those were real fun times. You realized the amount of planning and prep the boys over at Roland took to get those sounds in and out of those things. The programming was intense and probably more fine tuned than what you see in today's soft synths due to all of the hardware limitations during the time.

There was Hanz Zimmer or John Williams if I'm not mistaken (correct me if I'm wrong) who had 32 S760s and upgraded to several XV5080s (since it had 128MB instead of 32MB which was huge around 1999ish or so). To use 32 S760s w/32MB each lets you appreciate the little that the Integra7 can do. (I do remember this being on the cover of the December 2000 Issue of Keyboard Magazine)

I also give Roland credit for being able to stretch their 1991 recorded S700 library via 20 years of released products. Even some of the base waves on their ARX products are derived from that OLD LIBRARY (listen to a lot of the patches and you'll hear them). The SRX Brass card for example, 90% of the base waves on that boards are from the Brass S700 library (less so w/the ARX brass, but they're definitely there), just reworked with some extra EQ, finer programming, and with some extra help from internal XV and eventually Fantom waves.

With all my bickering, I hope it sells well. Korg (who I'm not a real fan of) has been burying Roland w/innovative products since 2006-ish.

anotherscott wrote:

mojkarma wrote:

Effects:
we are back at ONE FX per part if I read the specs correctly. So, we can again start to discuss how to create a organ with rotary and overdrive...

Interestingly, that does seem to have been somehow addressed. Check the demo page at http://www.roland.com/video/page.cfm?id=266863930002
and listen to the one labelled "C3 Rock 3 [#0061]" -- it has rotary and overdrive.

Yes. It's the old Roland trick where they sample an organ with overdrive to overcome the problem with the restricted effect structure.
Great that you have put this example.
Whenever I see how Roland controls the rotary speed, I can't stop shaking my head. I would give everything to learn what Scott thinks about this nonsense. You have to spent your left hand and hold the modulation lever in the up position all the time for a fast rotary effect. And Roland is using this method for more than 15 years now. The word "stupid" is simply not strong enough to explain what here is going on.
Yamaha or Kurzweil don't have the problem because they use a wheel which is not spring loaded. Korg uses a spring loaded joystick, but ther you have to move the joystick up once, and it triggers the fast rotary. You can proceed playing organ with both hands. Pull the joystick again and it returns to slow.
Now look what Roland does over, and over, and over, and over again for more than 15 years.
That's what happens when engineers program the OS without a clue how instruments are played.

epu wrote:

Fair enough, but that 4 SRX limitation makes it a dealbreaker.

I am really a bit surprised at all the concern about that limitation. Except for the Fantom XR, nothing has ever permitted more than 4 SRX cards worth of sounds to be loaded at once, and people didn't think those models were so useless. More to the point, by today's standards, compared to the SN stuff that's in the box, a lot of the SRX cards aren't terribly useful anyway. I'm not sure there would even be more than four I'd care about having. I'm surprised so many people seem to need simultaneous access to so many essentially second rate sounds, when so many better SN sounds are available without using up any slots.

epu wrote:

W/o 512 or at least 256 note polyphony, it's not worth it IMO.

As I said elsewhere, you can buy a pair of them, and have 256 polyphony and simultaneous access to 8 cards, if you must! Not cheap, but less than it would have cost you to buy a pair of XV-5080s and 8 SRX cards. (And if you're willing to wait, eventually you'll be able to save some money by picking up used ones.)

mojkarma wrote:

anotherscott wrote:

Whenever I see how Roland controls the rotary speed, I can't stop shaking my head. I would give everything to learn what Scott thinks about this nonsense. You have to spent your left hand and hold the modulation lever in the up position all the time for a fast rotary effect.

No need to give everything, but feel free to buy me an Integra-7. ;-)

From the impression I have so far, the best way to get organ out of these models is to send the sound out its own output jack and into a Ventilator. Apart from that, yes, what you describe there would be incredibly dumb. Though if there's a way to switch leslie speed with a footswitch, I could forgive it.

anotherscott wrote:

mojkarma wrote:

anotherscott wrote:

Whenever I see how Roland controls the rotary speed, I can't stop shaking my head. I would give everything to learn what Scott thinks about this nonsense. You have to spent your left hand and hold the modulation lever in the up position all the time for a fast rotary effect.

No need to give everything, but feel free to buy me an Integra-7. ;-)

From the impression I have so far, the best way to get organ out of these models is to send the sound out its out output jack and into a Ventilator. Apart from that, yes, what you describe there would be incredibly dumb. Though if there's a way to switch leslie speed with a footswitch, I could forgive it.

Although I agree that an external box like the Neo-Ventilator or even a boss Leslie simulator, the way Roland uses the Joystick to switch the Leslie speed seem to be cumbersome, It's not exactly accurate that it is the only way to do it.
Roland always gave the option to use the foot switch provided we configure the Matrix control properly (that's how I did it on my Fantom), and in newer models like the Juno-Gi, RD series and even JP-80 there are dedicated buttons for that.

And by the way... I'm on the list for an integra-7 too Mojkarma ;-)

anotherscott wrote:

As I said elsewhere, you can buy a pair of them, and have 256 polyphony and simultaneous access to 8 cards, if you must! Not cheap, but less than it would have cost you to buy a pair of XV-5080s and 8 SRX cards. (And if you're willing to wait, eventually you'll be able to save some money by picking up used ones.)

At $1999, I shouldn't have to "buy a pair" to achieve what can be done elsewhere for CHEAP. Based on Roland Architecture (which hasn't changed much in 20+ years) and what current processor technology and memory offers, it should be 256-512 polyphony at the MINIMUM w/access to all cards at once if they're touting this as the ENTIRE COLLECTION of 6000+ sounds in one box. That's misleading. Like I said, an annoying "Gotchya". There is no reason for these limitations, especially since Roland says it's not backwards compatible with anything.

Furthermore, Roland sounds are GREAT, but as a producer in the MODERN AGE, I'd end up pulling those same old 1990s "strip sounds to the bare minimum" tricks in order to get complex arrangements out of this box. It sucks that my EP (for example) will NOT sound the same in a PERFORMANCE/Sequence as it would in patch mode if I want to use my Integra 7 to do an arrangement while still utilizing the 128 polyphony. Having MFX on each channel would be pretty moot considering that my patch will most likely still sound different if I'd want to do something complex with it.

epu wrote:

anotherscott wrote:

As I said elsewhere, you can buy a pair of them, and have 256 polyphony and simultaneous access to 8 cards, if you must! Not cheap, but less than it would have cost you to buy a pair of XV-5080s and 8 SRX cards. (And if you're willing to wait, eventually you'll be able to save some money by picking up used ones.)

At $1999, I shouldn't have to "buy a pair" to achieve what can be done elsewhere for CHEAP.

Computers are often the cheapest way to do something. Developing and manufacturing hardware that will sell in (relatively) small volume is generally much more expensive than just developing software that will run on commodity hardware and a commodity OS. So yes, granted, you can get tons of good sounds out of a computer, cheap. But if you're comparing dedicated hardware to dedicated hardware (which does have certain advantages of its own), I don't think you get Integra-7 capability elsewhere for cheap.

If you want Roland's SuperNATURAL modeling sounds (which is the primary purpose of the box), and you want 256 polyphony, you can get a Jupiter 80 for $3500, or you can get a pair of Integra-7 for $4000. The Jupiter 80 includes a keyboard, touch screen, and live oriented button interface. But the pair of Integras gives you 32 parts (2 sets of 16 MIDI channels) vs. 4 parts on the Jupiter 80; the Integras allow you to play up to 32 tones at a time vs. 10 tones on the Jupiter 80 (2 parts of up to 4 tones, plus 2 parts of 1 tone each); the Integra includes all the tones of the 12 SRX cards (with 8 banks loadable at once) vs. zero SRX sounds on the Jupiter 80. (Then there's also the surround processing and some other stuff.)

Or if you really don't care about the SuperNATURAL sounds and just happen to like the SRX sound set, as I said, get a pair of XV-5080s and buy the 12 SRX cards (you can load any 8 of them at a time), that's not going to be cheap either (even used, you'll probably be in the $3k range!).

Of course, if you're not interested in Roland's sounds in particular, there's no reason to buy any of this. Though if you're comparing hardware-to-hardware, I'm not sure Yamaha or Korg offer you anything more for the money.

epu wrote:

It sucks that my EP (for example) will NOT sound the same in a PERFORMANCE/Sequence as it would in patch mode if I want to use my Integra 7 to do an arrangement while still utilizing the 128 polyphony.

I am not an expert in Roland stuff, so maybe I"m missing something. Why will it not sound the same in either mode? Do you mean because you would run out of polyphony and so notes could drop? Other than that, I don't think the fx would be different, because each Integra sound has its own dedicated fx, right? So it should sound the same alone or in combination.

I guess the drawback of one-effect-per-sound is that you can't cascade effects (for example, to get a good organ, as discussed above), but the advantage of one-effect-per-sound should mean that every sound is the same whether you use it alone or in combination. That is, if they have 16 fx processor for 16 sounds dedicated that way, each sound should sound the same whether you're triggering one or sixteen of them. If they let you "steal" an fx processor so you could put two fx on one sound, your 16th sound would have no fx available. So while that would let you create single sounds with more complex fx, you would no longer be assured that each sound would always sound the same no matter how many of them you were triggering. Or am I misunderstanding something?

anotherscott wrote:

I am not an expert in Roland stuff, so maybe I"m missing something. Why will it not sound the same in either mode? Do you mean because you would run out of polyphony and so notes could drop? Other than that, I don't think the fx would be different, because each Integra sound has its own dedicated fx, right? So it should sound the same alone or in combination.

I guess the drawback of one-effect-per-sound is that you can't cascade effects (for example, to get a good organ, as discussed above), but the advantage of one-effect-per-sound should mean that every sound is the same whether you use it alone or in combination. That is, if they have 16 fx processor for 16 sounds dedicated that way, each sound should sound the same whether you're triggering one or sixteen of them. If they let you "steal" an fx processor so you could put two fx on one sound, your 16th sound would have no fx available. So while that would let you create single sounds with more complex fx, you would no longer be assured that each sound would always sound the same no matter how many of them you were triggering. Or am I misunderstanding something?

+1 anotherscott

anotherscott wrote:

Computers are often the cheapest way to do something. Developing and manufacturing hardware that will sell in (relatively) small volume is generally much more expensive than just developing software that will run on commodity hardware and a commodity OS.

This is an excuse..... The hardware is cheap, and the software is more or less already there since this is based on old Roland tech

another wrote:

I am not an expert in Roland stuff, so maybe I"m missing something. Why will it not sound the same in either mode?

If you are a Roland power user, and used an XV or JV as your sole sound source, then you'd know that if you have a PERFORMANCE of 16 patches using 16 channels with many of those instruments playing at the same time, you'd have LOTS of voices cut off and drop due to polyphony issues. This is exacerbated by the fact that Roland patches (most of them, particularly the good ones) are comprised of more than one TONE.

This means that let say you had a pad that used 4 TONES, that's 4 voices there. Let's say that sound was playing a chord consisting of 4 notes, that would be 16 voices there. Now lets say you had 8 of such patches playing at once... you get the idea. You'd run out of voices very quickly. The fact that I'd be able to have MFX on every channel (which should be the case in the first place nowadays) doesn't help me in this scenario.

The only way to get around this is to save the individual patches to user memory and strip out parts. Maybe on a Trumpet patch, you'd remove the BREATH tone, and maybe one of the TONES that adds color to the sound. You'd do this until you were left with a patch that used just ONE or TWO TONES to save on polyphony.

The result is a patch that sounds "somewhat" close to your original (closer if you Roland patch programming chops were up to par).

This resulted in lots of wasted time and too much work. If you're buying a Roland Box and aren't doing complex arrangements, then you won't care.

XVs are dead. Too proprieatary. I had one for years, but when you go from editing patches on a tiny screen and saving them to outdated SmartMedia cards, and then go to editing on a large screen and saving as many patches as you want, wherever you want, you get kind of spoiled :)

epu wrote:

anotherscott wrote:

Computers are often the cheapest way to do something. Developing and manufacturing hardware that will sell in (relatively) small volume is generally much more expensive than just developing software that will run on commodity hardware and a commodity OS.

This is an excuse..... The hardware is cheap, and the software is more or less already there since this is based on old Roland tech

Hardware components are cheap. But actual hardware that does something is only cheap when using a commodity platform and commodity OS... it's not cheap to design and fabricate your own, and that's reflected in the price of these things, as you have to amortize all the development costs into a relatively small number of units (compared to sales of things like laptops, phones, or ipads). And even cheap components become somewhat pricey when put into a low volume (and therefore high markup) environment. $100 worth of components in a Dell probably cost the consumer about $130. $100 worth of components in a musical instrument probably cost the consumer upwards of $300.

I also would not call it old Roland tech. The Jupiter 80 (the primary antecedent to the Integra-7) is pretty new tech... in many ways, it seems like a pretty significant departure from their earlier boards. And the Integra-7 adds more to that (both old and new).

But by all means, if you don't think it's worth it, don't buy it. ;-) I suspect there is a market for this, and I think it will probably sell pretty well. It's actually something of a bold move for Roland, as the MIDI rack module market has been largely abandoned. Korg, Nord, and Kurzweil don't sell rack units anymore, and Yamaha has just one, which is still hanging around from 2008. I'd love for successful Integra sales to spark a revival of this product segment.

I think this is perfectly suitable for LIVE playing, and I think this will do VERY well for those Tour Juggernauts who do shows all over the place and need a solid performance board that is rugged and can take a lot of beating. The USB thumb drive for settings is awesome for this also as one can be purchased anywhere. Also having a lot of sounds on call for use in any situation. In settings like these, the 4 slot limitation will NOT be an issue.

In recording studios, maybe for a few sounds, and it will go over well with JV/XP nostalgiasts, who need a Roland patch here and there for their tracks.

HOWEVER, Roland JV/XP/XVs were initially marketed as your ONE STOP SHOP for EVERYTHING. The Integra will NOT serve that market well these days because the market has changed substantially.

I also hope it does well.

PauloF wrote:

And by the way... I'm on the list for an integra-7 too Mojkarma ;-)

That's fine for you.
I was thinking about getting one too. However, as a jupiter80 owner, I won't spend my money to get a jupiter again in the form of a module and over it a 12 years old xv5080 and 4 pathetic expansion slots which have to be shared between 20 expansions. All that in 2012 when other companies offer gigabytes of sound material immediately accessible.
Since I'm a live gigging musician and I rely on my own sound creations and setups, the information about user memory is essential for me. For same strange reason, Roland doesn't provide this information now. I guess it doesn't matter for museums and all those planetariums who can't wait to buy the Integra.
Further, since it's a module, I would expect a vst/au VI that let you integrate the module into your DAW. Instead, they offer you an editor reserved exclusively for iPad owners (I myself am an iPad user).
I already said it somewhere: it's highly cumbersome that a company gives you an editor reserved exclusively for Apple/Mac/OSX/iOS customers, while at the same time they give you Sonar Le, a windows exclusively sequencer as part of the package you buy. It's a mess. Even if it comes from Roland, it's too much for me.

When did you get your JP80? Did you keep your Fantom G? How do the two compare?

I still have my G and a JV1080 so if want to keep the Fantom G add the Supernatural stuff and keep my old sounds the Integra-7 could work well. I'd sell my JV and its cards. But yes I agree we need more details about its capacity, way it works, compatibility etc...