The design is cool. It looks like you could drop it from an airplane without breaking it. The JD-800 is very service friendly. This will save you a lot of money on repairs.

To me this is a solo-machine. With the four layers you can create very expressive sounds and modify them in real time. There are four sliders on the palette. The are assigned to the same parameter for each layer. This makes editing even faster. You can also use the palette to change the shape of the sound while you play.

The acoustic piano, brass and strings are not good at all. But they are not supposed to do so. This is a synth that acts similar to an analog machine, which it doue great with its FOUR parallel processors (most synths like D-50, D-70, U-20, JV-80, XP-10 only have one). If you want the autenthic acoustic sounds buy the cards with new waveforms for acoustic instruments and there you are.

The JD-800 is good at synth strings and leads. It is also very suitable for dance and techno.

The JD-800 is no good in multi-timbral mode. The cool efx. section is cut seriously down when you enter multi mode. You will also get problems with the polyphony.

Amazing how many of the presets are in common use on records even today.

I've never much understood the attaction of knob twiddling while you are playing, but this has converted me!

This and an SY85 are now the backbone of my playing rig. This is not a workstation and shouldn't be thought of as one. It's a performance synth.

I'd like to recommend getting the Strings PCM/program cardset, as it will show just how good this synth can sound - very high fidelity.

My opinion on the sliders is that they *are* great, but it can be a slight nuisance finding and selecting the correct layered patch out of the 4 possible to modify. It's not incredibly difficult it's just that I believe this aspect of the synth could have been implemented a little better.

Some of the factory waveforms are a little dull sounding, but that could be said of any rompler... Some of my favorite sounds are the dist. guitars (the best I've ever heard) and the more ethereal patches like Killer Pad, Hybrid Strings and Invocation. The Painz and Injury patch will make your ears bleed (in a really cool way!) and Perc Vox Stack is really neat too, along with many other factory sounds. Apart from that, the Strings cardset has the best string sounds I have ever heard from any synth. I have 6 of the cardsets for the JD and Strings is my favorite. Can you tell?

The JD is a fun synth to program too, with the sliders and all. It should be mentioned though that the Multi mode is pretty anemic. This synth relies heavily on the effects section for it's overall sound. In Multi mode, the same effects are assigned to all patches so you lose the individual patch characteristics bigtime. You (usually) don't want the distortion effect from the guitar patch messing with that nice string ensemble do ya?

All in all it's a great sounding synth but realistically there are a lot of awesome synths to come out since this one was on the market. Back in it's day, I would have given it a 4.5. Now I'd say it's more like a 3.5, but that's weighing it against the modern day competition.