Gear Porn Friday!

Okay, rather than a ludicrous wall of gear, today I’m giving up a ludicrous _rack_ of gear. I copped this off the Waveterm page. What you’re looking at is a fairly complete version of what was, for all intents and purposes, PPG’s final product series. From the top, it is a Waveterm B, the Expansion Voice unit (to give 8 more voices to a Waveterm/Wave system, for a total of 32 voices), the Expander (which gave an additional hard drive), and the HDU, which gave the Wave system direct-to-disk recording. You can just see a PPG Wave 2.x (probably 2.3, given the rest of the system) peeking in on the right.

For its day, this was about as powerful as wavetable synthesis got, and is certainly still a viable system today. I don’t know who owns this, but the process of elimination would say that it was owned by the creator of the Waveterm C software, which is downloadable on the same page. The Waveterm C package allows any random PC to emulate the Waveterm, so if you have a Wave 2.3, you’re good to go. Note that this package also comes with a Wave 2.3 emulator which is surprisingly good. Download the demo to give it a try. You can actually have a whole Wave system (like you see in the picture above) running in software, should you desire. I feel it sounds better than the Waldorf VST plug (which is now abandonware, sadly.)