JOVE: Jupiter-6 inspired filter for Eurorack

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System 80 JOVE · Source: System 80 System 80 JOVE · Source: System 80

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System 80 came to our attention a couple of months ago with a video of a forthcoming Roland-808 clone squeezed into Eurorack format. While we’re waiting for that to arrive their love of all things Roland has produced a rather lovely looking filter. Called “Jove” it’s based on the multimode filter from the Roland Jupiter-6.

JOVE

System 80 set out to capture some of the originality of the Jupiter-6 filter. It was different to other filters Roland used and has a distinct sound. It’s based around a cascaded Operational Transconductance Amplifier (OTA). The original IR3109 quad OTA is no longer obtainable and so they used the very similar LM13700 OTA. They believe JOVE to be as faithful as you can get to the character of the Jupiter-6 without using obsolete parts.

JOVE has the 3 original Jupiter-6 modes of low, band and high but they also included a 2-pole 12 dB low pass mode which approximates the Jupiter-8 filter. It has two inputs, one log-attenuated and one not. There are two similarly attenuated CV inputs for frequency and one for resonance. The hybrid nature of the audio and CV inputs taken from the MKS80 and SH101, respectively, was inspired by the AMSynths AM8060.

The front panel looks fabulous. I am loving the design and the Jupiter colour palette. It’s very clearly laid out in the 14hp space. At $240 it’s well priced for a classic sounding, well-implemented filter. I’m quite excited about what else System 80 have up their sleeve.

Sadly there’s no video of it in action but there are plenty of sound examples on the System 80 website.

