Roland Paraphonic 505

Title link takes you to shots pulled from this auction.

via Brian Comnes.

For more on the Roland Paraphonic see this Keyboard Magazine article. Scroll down when you get there.

"In the Dark Ages of electronic music, the words “synthesized strings” conjured images of just one sound; the Solina String Ensemble and its closely related cousin, the ARP String Ensemble. They did one thing well, which was to crank out sustained sawtooth-wave approximations of a string section. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, fully programmable polysynths such as the Prophet-5 from Sequential Circuits and Roland’s Jupiter-8 made dedicated string synths redundant, especially when programmable polysynths became more affordable with the advent of the Roland Juno series and the Korg PolySix.

But squished somewhere between the era of non-programmable mono synths (Minimoogs, ARP Odysseys, and the like) and the revolutionary programmable polysynths were a number of “in-between” units such as the Moog Opus 3, ARP Quadra, and Roland Paraphonic 505. These weren’t truly programmable, but they had separate — and polyphonic — brass and strings alongside a “lead synth” section. The sum of the parts wasn’t ever really competitive with real programmable polysynths, but these faux polys were a little easier on the wallet than a $5,000 Prophet or Jupiter-8."