Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: All about the Roland Jupiter-series

Hi. I'm new to the group, so I may as well breifly introduce myself.
I'm 40, and live in Tasmania. I started playing synths (Moog 15) in
1975. Took a long vacation from recording in the 90's, and am
just getting back into it. I am recently the proud owner of a J4,
which was going fine till today - so a little about how I came to get
it, and then the problem.

I was actually emailing a guy who lives in Brisbane (about 1500 miles
away), after I'd been outbid on a Wavestation he was selling on ebay.
He mentioned he had a Jupiter 4 in the cupboard which he hadn't
touched for years, but he didn't think anyone would want it. I told
him I might just want it, so he gave it to me for the cost of the
shipping!

Anyway after arrivin 1550 miles by road and sea/air or whatever, and
being dragged from one end of the house to the other along the floor
(the bloody thing weighed 55 pounds in its box, and I've got a bad
back), I set it up on a stand, plugged it in, turned it on, and it
worked perfectly. No missing or damaged anything, just a few scratches
in the wood.

I knew the presets were going to be silly, so I just went straight to
the arpeggiator, and was almost instantly in heaven! (though I wish
they'd included a way of controlling the range of the thing.)

I also discovered quite quickly thatthe Jupiter 4 - or mine anyway -
has more personality than any other synth I've owned or played. It
reminds me of myself when I wake up in the morning. It takes a while
for my brain to work properly. Quite amusing to sit there playing a C
scale and listening to the oscillators slowly deciding to get into
tune. It also has an interesting habit of getting bored and playing
with its own sounds if you put it in 'hold' mode and ignore it for a
while.

Anyway, the problem: for the first two days it worked perfectly, but
today the outputs stopped working. Both of them. Well,that isn't quite
correct. I can still hear it if I turn up the amp dangerously high. I
can still play it perfectly ok through the headphone output(!), but
this is rather frustrating for at least two reasons. 1) you can't
control the volume, except to an extent by adjusting the VCA gain, and
2) whathappens if that output decides to die as well?

I should perhaps add that I touched absoutely nothing between the time
that the outputs worked, and when they decided to stop. I siply turned
it off, and turned it on a few hours later.

The only thing I can think of which could have affected it is that I
have a heater in the room which I turn on at night, which raises the
temperature of the room a little, but I used this all three nights. I
did suspect the temperature changes made it grumpy and caused the
tuning problems on warm-up, but I don't see how it would kill the line
outs.

Any ideas? I'm hoping this is something obvious and stupid, and I
won't have to take the thing to bits (I started unscrewing the top
plate, then realised how many sliders and knobs I was going to have to
take off, and decided to wait until I knew it was unavoidable.)

Anyway, hi.

Tim