Waldorf Wave 3.v - Manual (Page 61)

Appendix
61 PPG Wave 3.V User´s Manual
Appendix
History
In the end of 1970, the German mastermind Wolfgang
Palm and his company PPG (Palm Products Germany)
came up with the idea, to copy the sound and behaviour
of analog circuits and replace it with a digital
representation of oscillator waveforms. In this process,
different successive waveforms were stored in
Wavetables. While passing through, the sound changed
its character, which could be controlled by using
envelopes, LFOs or other control sources. This resulted in
a sound which continuously changed its character and
enabled soft transitions between similar sounding
waveforms or extreme jumps between totally different
sound spectra. With their additional subsequent analog
filters, the PPG synthesizers quickly reach cult status and
their typical “Wave sound” could be heard on a great
number of music productions of their time. We at Waldorf
have successfully on-developed Wavetable synthesis for
many years. But there are still many fans of the initial
powerful PPG sound around.
How near is the PPG Wave 3.V to the Originaly?
To give you a simple answer: very near! An example: the
filter in the original PPG was a SSM 2044 chip. If the
resonance was increased, this filter attenuated the input
signal by up to 12dB. The PPG Wave 3.V works exactly
like that. Furthermore, the resonance of the SSM 2044 had
a very special character, which in this form is not
implemented in any other filter circuit or IC. If you have
the chance to listen to and directly compare both the
original and the Plug-In, you will find, that the resonance
(or Emphasis, as it’s called in the PPG) of both sounds
absolutely identical. Another characteristic of the original
PPG was its Aliasing noise – actually a side-effect during
the reproduction of digital signals – which added an
originally undesired noise level to the sound. Actually, it
is very simple to create Aliasing. But creating a type of
Aliasing that has the same behaviour as on the PPG, is a
challenge. In the PPG Wave 3.V you can even choose,
whether you want Aliasing of the PPG Wave 2.2, the PPG
Wave 2.3 or none.
The only thing, that we did not emulate, was the hum
noise of the display back-lighting. We assume, that
nobody really wants to use this “feature”. There are many
more factors, that are responsible for the typical PPG