Behringer has finally lifted the lid on its long-promised JN-80, and for the first time in more than four decades players who grew up lusting after a Roland Juno-60 can own one with features the original never had — at a price that won't demand a second mortgage.
The eight-voice analogue synth is up for pre-order at $569/£479 ahead of a May ship date, MusicRadar reports. It's been a long wait: Behringer first teased the JN-80 back in 2023 and showed a working version at NAMM 2026 earlier this year.
What it is, and what's new
For anyone approaching this cold, the Juno-60 is one of the most sampled, sequenced and sought-after polysynths ever made — a 1982 Roland instrument whose lush chorus and warm DCO sound defined pop, synthwave and house records across the decades. Clean originals now trade for thousands.
The JN-80 is Behringer's attempt to bottle that sound in a cheaper, more playable package. Eight digitally-controlled analogue oscillators produce saw and square waveforms with PWM, backed by a sub-oscillator and noise generator. The signal path runs through a 24dB low-pass filter modelled on the Juno's 3109 chip, a new high-pass filter, and a VCA based on the original BA662 chip. The famous chorus is handled by a bespoke multi-stage BBD circuit designed, Behringer says, to emulate the Juno original from the ground up.
So far, so faithful. It's the 21st-century additions that will interest players more than collectors.
Velocity, aftertouch, and why it matters
The original Juno-60 had 61 unweighted keys with no velocity sensitivity and no aftertouch. The JN-80 ships with 49 velocity-sensitive keys and channel aftertouch — a genuinely consequential upgrade for anyone using a Juno as a lead or expressive pad machine rather than a background strings-and-brass texture.
A word of clarification for the spec-sheet readers: channel aftertouch is not full MPE, which requires per-note pitch and pressure. Buyers hoping for polyphonic aftertouch should set expectations accordingly — Behringer has stopped short of that. But with full MIDI CC control over every sound-shaping parameter, and both 5-pin DIN and USB MIDI onboard, the JN-80 will sit happily under an MPE controller for players who want per-voice expression routed in from elsewhere.
The modulation section has grown teeth too: a tempo-synced LFO, four additional arpeggiator modes, and five voice configurations — poly, mono, unison, quad and duo — that let you carve the eight voices up creatively. Polyphonic portamento is in there as well.
Storage is a healthy 400 user patches, with 200 factory presets (100 of them supplied by preset house Ultimate Patches) to get you started. An LCD screen handles navigation, and CV, sync and pedal inputs round out the back panel alongside stereo quarter-inch outputs and a dedicated headphone jack.
The Behringer question
No assessment of a Behringer clone can ignore the company's reputation. The brand has built a business on aggressively priced hardware replicas of classic gear, and its track record on build quality, long-term support, and its relationship with the originals' manufacturers has — politely — divided opinion for years.
Early NAMM demos suggest the JN-80 sounds convincing. How closely the filter and chorus track the Roland original, and how the units hold up under studio use, will only be properly settled once they land in May.
For players who were never going to drop several thousand pounds on a 1982 Juno-60, though, £479 for a playable, velocity- and aftertouch-equipped reinterpretation is hard to argue with.
