As far as I could see, most people who reviewed it agree that it sounds great. Well, not to my ears - I think the sound is bland, the oscillators lack smoothness, which is particularly obvious when played polyphonically. Also, there isn't nearly enough low end: you have to switch on the square wave-only suboscillator to get anything like a bass sound, and it wouldn't hurt if there was a second suboscillator to phatten things up properly.

The straight VCO>VCF>VCA sound is nothing special therefore, but it can fortunately be modulated in lots of ways with great results. The synth is really easy to tweak it: the control panel is nicely laid out and the pitch/mod lever is fantastic and allows for really expressive playing...unlike the keyboard, sadly enough, which is terribly clunky. For a synth this old, the keyboard is actually pretty decent, but I still couldn't play it properly, which became a real problem as there is no other way to play the synth. You can retrofit CV/Gate and/or MIDI, but in my opinion, Jupiter-4 isn't that special to warrant the cost.

For me, there isn't much to recommend the Jupiter-4. It isn't much of a polysynth and as a monosynth, it's way too big for what it does. The fact that it's so old got me living in constant fear that something might go wrong inside with no-one to fix it. Yes, it looks great and it does have its moments, but as far as I'm concerned, Jupiter-4 just isn't that special. The bloke that bought it seemed to have liked it a lot - I hope he ends up using it more that I did. If you want to hear the synth in action, drop me a line at sartre@siol.net I've also still got the original schematics for it - if you're interested, please use the same address.