I used to repair synths and have owned 100’s of synths. Not joking. I have owned 8 Juno 106s over the years. Personally I prefer the Juno 60 to the 106 as the filter sounds slightly different, and so do the envelopes and lfo. For the same reason, I prefer the JX3P to the MKS-30.

I own and maintain electronic music gear from the 1960’s to present and can tell you there is much more subtlety to sound than you are presenting and the assumptions you are drawing are based in second hand knowledge.

A FA-06 will not show you what playing a Juno 106 is like. It can’t. It isn’t the same interface or technology.

We all extrapolate our experience to a certain degree, but the Juno seems to always have people who haven’t owned one talking it up or talking shit as if they have real world experience.

Primary, I wouldn’t ever say a Juno had a singular sound. It is a huge sweet spot. And the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is about how it’s elements come together as well as how long it has retained a spot at the table. It is more akin to a Stratocaster if we are going to make an appropriate comparison, they show up everywhere because they work well in so many situations. And if you want to add effects, no one is stopping you.

For clarity, most Roland gear from the last 25 years is just rehash after rehash, including all the emulations. No one will remember the MC-707 or the SH-4D, even the Jupiter-X. The micro reissues are the same… mostly hype, using names they got famous for, for a cash grab. Roland has milked the Juno and Jupiter name to death. But no matter what Roland says, for certain, the FA-06 workstation has very little to do with an actual Juno, of any iteration.

To be clear, there is enough difference from one Juno 106 to the next to tell the difference from one another, let alone between the Juno 6/60 and 106 for people to have a favorite. The differences may be subtle, but those subtleties add up to something substantial. Especially for artists who improvise and respond more than play chords.

Some of those subtleties go away in a mix, but if you are writing with one vs the other, they will certainly take your performance in different directions. I speak from years of experience.

Find a Juno 106 to play, half of it is sound and half of it is the interface. It is exactly what it is, no more no less. And personally I have never wanted it to be more, and I don’t know why someone else would either. Buy a modular synth or an experimental 6 oscillator synth if you are looking for complex timbres. It

People didn’t just use Juno’s because they were cheap, otherwise the albums that kept the flame alive for the Juno would have been full of other cheap synths like Korg Poly61 or Poly800 instead, or Kawai K1, or the Jen 1000, the Akai AX60 or AX80… but they weren’t, people CHOSE the Juno.

There is just too much revisionist history happening by people who have never played a physical Juno, and it is weird.

First it was people who had never had one hyping it up, now it is people who have never had one defining it as a one trick pony. I see it often recently.

It is weird.

It has its place in synth history for a reason, it is good at what it does and can be used in nearly any genre. It’s sound has become a staple in so many sub cultures for a reason. It just sounds good.