Behringer's JT-2 reaches Europe: one Jupiter-8 voice for €179

Behringer’s habit of carving famous polysynths down to a single voice continues, and this one has just started shipping in Europe. The JT-2, shown in final form at NAMM in January and officially released in mid-April, is now in stock on the continent at €179, with the first batch reported as limited. The concept is blunt: take one voice of Roland’s Jupiter-8 and rebuild it as an 80HP module that ships inside a desktop enclosure, ready to be popped out into a Eurorack case.

The voice itself is a faithful bit of engineering. Two VCOs offer saw, triangle, square and pulse shapes plus noise, with PWM, hard sync and cross-modulation on tap. Those feed a resonant low-pass filter switchable between 12 and 24 dB slopes, backed by a separate high-pass, with two ADSR envelopes with key follow and an LFO running sine, saw, square and random shapes. An arpeggiator covers up, down, up-down and random patterns across four octaves.

The interesting wrinkle is at the edges of the spec sheet. A paraphonic mode lets two notes share the voice, and a poly chain function links up to sixteen units into one polyphonic instrument, meaning you could, in principle, reassemble a Jupiter-8 out of eight desktop tins. Connectivity is generous for the money: CV and gate, sync in, a filter output, front-panel MIDI in, MIDI thru and USB.

Stateside buyers are still waiting; US retailers list the JT-2 as a pre-order at around $259 with stock expected later in the year. In Europe, it’s first come, first served.

Producer’s note

Paraphonic is not polyphonic: both notes run through one filter and one envelope. Treat it as an effect rather than a piano. Fifths and octaves under a lead line sound huge; full chords with long releases turn to mush because every new note re-fires the shared envelope.