Technic



Inside

Inside a 32 voice WAVE:

analog boards slave board main board
analog boards
each holding 4 voices
  		slave board
each controlling 16 voices
  		main board
controlling up to 48 voices and storage
 
details of the analog boards ASIS + CPU  
analog board detail
you see the Curtis CEM 3387 filter chip here 		An ASIC and a CPU
(see text below) 		pics © Till Kopper 2002
The ASICs were designed 1988 by Wolfgang Palm (ex PPG-chief & inventer) by order of Waldorf. The same chip can be found inside the Waldorf MicroWave I and its rare Waveslave expander.



Prototype analog board

The prototype WAVEs had all its 16 analog filters on a single board:

analog board rev1 detail of rev1
giant!
27 x 48 cm (10.6 x 18.9 inch) 		a single filter
and some general parts

THANKS to WALDORF-MUSIC AG for giving this piece of WAVE history to me
pics © Till Kopper 2002



Speed

In order to measure the voice update speed I played a rectangular wave without any modulation through the fully opened filter. The VCA envelope was set to:


stepped WAVE update

Take your pocket calculator and calculate with me:
Length of the 9 easy to spot volume graduations (last one at 187 msec minus the first one at 20 msec = 167 msec) divided by 9 gradations = 0,01878 updates per second , about 53 Hz.

This is not high tech, but you wont notice this on this example. But you will notice this on all pitch modulations such as envelope pitchbend and long glide.

Zippernoise :-(

Remarks



Attack

I measured the attack time first with a 1000 Hz rectangular wave and the AmpEnv set to the value 0:

WAVE attack set to zero

You can see the very fast half millisecond attack time on the first example. This much faster than a Minimoog. But this is much to fast for nearly all pitches, therefor you will hear a short crack. If the waveshape is not at a zero crossing this fast attack will generate a sharp transient which consist of additional harmonics. These harmonics are audible as cracking noise.

WAVE attack set to 1

For the second example I changed the attack time value to 1. Now the attack time was 5 msec, which is longer as the zero value at 1,5 msec on a Minimoog.

Remarks





HMT

Taken from "KEYS" 3/95

Sorry, just a very shortened english translation

Possible by electronics: the just intonation of synthesizers

Programmable tunning for Synthesizers

The pure sound

Just intonation does sound better. But it wasn't available for synths before the Hermode Tunning (HMT).

A report by Reinhold Heil

The fifth are a little bit flat. The thirds are sharp. It started with Bach. The equal tempered scaling is just of the perfect pitch ratios.
You could use the micro tunning tables of a Yamaha DX 7 II. But if you programmed a perfect C scale, you got out of tune if you changed the key while doing tonal modulations.
And Mr. Mohrlok changed this. It does analyse the key you playing in and changes the tunning on the fly according to the used chords.
He sold the patent do Waldorf, the makers of the WAVE and Wersi. And he didn't got rich.
So he did a Macintosh and Atari program to send the "de"-tunning values to play in perfect intonation.
If you play more classical chords, you will find the sound much better. But you might prefer the tempered scaling for more jazz like chords. If you play to "strange" chords one after another, the HMT doesn't know which direction to follow. You might hear some detuning of notes..
So it does depend on the style of your music. But pure major chord a very strong.
You will get fine orchestra parts with the HMT.

Taken from "KEYS" 3/95

The Hermode Tunning is featured inside the Waldorf microwave I (with ROM version 2), the Q (OS 3.0 or above) DSP synth and the WAVE.

Remarks

I am very happy with my Waldorf WAVE! I don´t want to miss it.