Waldorf M £1,649
THE PROS & CONS
Two wavetable playback modes – Classic and Modern
Great-sounding analogue filters
Compatible with Microwave I SysEx band and sound transfer
Patch management could be better
Limited range of user wavetable import options compared to software
No built-in (analogue or digital) effects
Germany’s Waldorf have been around since the late 1980s, rising out of the ashes of Wolfgang Palm’s famed synth company PPG. PPG and Palm found success with their various ‘Wave’ synths which used the newly commercialised technique of wavetable synthesis. You’ll find more on the history and development of the wavetable concept in the box over the page, but the key concept behind this method of synthesis lies in the way in which the oscillators generate their sounds. Rather than having a conventional analogue oscillator with a range of basic waveform shapes (square, sawtooth etc), wavetable synthesisers use digital memory to store more complex single-cycle wave shapes that can then be filtered and modulated as usual. However, the way these complex forms are stored allows you to move between adjacent waveforms easily.
Sets of these waveforms are stored in a so-called ‘wavetable’,
