PPG Wave

This early hardware digital synthesizer was designed by a German engineer named Wolfgang Palm, and was marketed by the company he founded called PPG (for Palm Products Germany). The most popular PPG synth was the Wave, which became famous for its ability to sweep through digital wavetables using onboard envelope generators. It also had analog filters, a sequencer, and a user-sampling option. The Wave 2.2 made its debut in 1982 with an $8,800 price tag, while the Wave 2.3 appeared in 1984 with a retail price of about $10,000! When the Wave 2.2 was first released, it had 8-voice polyphony, two digital oscillators per voice, 24dB-per-octave analog filters, a pressure-sensitive keyboard, 200 patches, an 8-track sequencer, 10-function arpeggiator, and numerous split and layered keyboard modes. The 2.2’s oscillators could generate almost 2,000 single-cycle waveforms (some of which were created from samples of real acoustic instruments like acoustic piano and saxophone). The Wave 2.2 was introduced just one year before the advent of MIDI.