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Digital Control Bus





PHYSICAL APPEARANCE


DCB was made in 2 variants, using 15-pin and 20-pin sockets and cables.


SUPPORTING EQUIPMENT


DCB era wasn't long and it was thoroughly replaced with MIDI in the beginning of 1980s . Roland produced these synthesizers with DCB interfaces:


Roland produced at least two DCB sequencers:


The latter was capable of saving eight sequences or a total of 3000 notes and was also capable of transmitting and receiving data via MIDI. However, this did not consitute a direct bridge between DCB and MIDI. Roland later released the MD-8, a rather large black box capable of converting MIDI signals to DCB and vice versa. While this allows note on/off to be sent to a Juno-60 by MIDI, the fix pales in comparison to the full MIDI implementation on the Juno-60's successor, the Roland Juno-106 .

Nowadays, few companies offer similar conversion boxes to attach DCB to regular MIDI buses to support these vintage synths in modern sound production environments.