Roland Jupiter-8

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Jupiter-8
Manufacturer	Roland Corporation
Dates	1981–1985
Price	¥980,000 JPY $5295 US £3995 GBP
Technical specifications
Polyphony	8 voices
Timbrality	2
Oscillator	2 VCOs per voice
LFO	1 triangle/square/sawtooth/random
Synthesis type	analog subtractive
Filter	12 or 24 dB/octave[1] resonant lowpass, non-resonant highpass 1 ADSR envelope for VCF
Attenuator	1 ADSR envelope for VCA
Aftertouch expression	No
Velocity expression	No
Storage memory	64 patches
Effects	None
Input/output
Keyboard	61 keys
External control	DCB (on later models)

The Jupiter-8, or JP-8, is an eight-voice polyphonic analog subtractive synthesizer introduced by Roland Corporation in early 1981.

The Jupiter-8 was Roland's flagship synthesizer for the first half of the 1980s. Approximately 3,300 units have been produced.^[2] Although it lacked the soon-to-be standard of MIDI control, later production series of the Jupiter-8 did include Roland's proprietary DCB interface. The instrument had many advanced features for its time, including the ability to split the keyboard into two zones, with separate patches active on each zone. Two years after the release of the Jupiter-8, Roland released the more affordable Jupiter-6 synthesizer with built-in MIDI control but an otherwise slightly reduced set of features.

In 2011, three decades after the release of the original Jupiter series, Roland released the fully digital Jupiter-80 and Jupiter-50 synthesizers as successors to the 1980s originals. They were in turn succeeded by the Jupiter-X and Jupiter-Xm in 2019.^[3] A Jupiter-8 plug-out was included already installed on the Roland System-8 synthesizer, in 2017.^[4][5]