The U-110 is a basic rack-mount sound module consisting of acoustic-oriented PCM samples with preset settings, limited flexibility, and boring late eighties sounds. It's nothing to get excited about. It has 2MB of ROM-based sampled sounds, none of which sound great. The U-110 is fairly noisy as well. Its palette of sounds could be grossly expanded with up to four expansion cards, but good luck finding those today!

The U-110's biggest distinction, really, is that it was Roland's first totally digital sample-based synth. At the time, that was a break-through - look at all the realistic sounds you get in a single rack space MIDI module! Nowadays, it's hard to wonder why anybody would want one of these. The U-110 was available in a prototype form as the T-110. But the U-110 was soon replaced by the U-20 keyboard and U-220 module. Astral Projection used a U-110 before they switched to the U-220.

Spiderman

September 22, 2011 @ 9:14 am

I finally decided to fire up my U110. I plugged the computer into it and only 1 channel will work at a time. Cakewalk has been no help and my D 20 works fine with the tunes. I rebooted the U 110.. no change. I have tried activating the other channels, but still the unit only responds to one channel at a time. Help !!!

Dan logic

September 21, 2011 @ 11:14 am

these are graet machines , if you are into retro sounds , the presets are sweet , nice drum kit , nice jazz sounds , you can pick 1 up in perfect nick for 20£ cant go wrong for that price , ive had mine for a lil while now , got all 25 pcm cards and love it. if u hate this then u are just silly. the only thing this module is made for is love.

kiskadar

August 2, 2011 @ 8:17 am

"Nowadays, it's hard to wonder why anybody would want one of these": the U-110 has four PCM card slots while the U-220/U-20 has only two.

Christian

June 16, 2011 @ 2:15 pm

I bought one in the Mid-80's to complement my Ensoniq ESQ'1 with realistic sampled sounds, and combined the two were awesome for MIDI music production (using the ESQ's built-in sequencer, and later Dr. T's KCS on an Amiga Computer).
With just 2 machines I had the best of both worlds, up to 39 notes polyphony and 14 parts - you couldn't have more at the time, for that kind of money!
The aliasing noises at the end of the sampled sounds were really bad though when not hidden within the arrangement, and when played live, there was a noticable latency the more notes you played simultaneously.

Chuck

May 20, 2011 @ 1:11 pm

Your video demo is actually the *D*-110, not the *U*-110. The D-110 was based on the D-50's synth engine and sounds quite a bit different.

The U-110 is basically a small handful of S-50 sounds fixed into ROM. Nothing worth getting. The U-220 is worthwhile for about $100 as it has the U-110 ROM plus a couple cards worth of sounds, more FX and much better patches. Still no filter. YOu need a D-70 for that.

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