A hybrid German wavetable machine with digital oscillators that hold their pitch and a real analog lowpass filter. It listed at $7,995.00, which was a house down payment at the time.
Overview
The Wave 2.2 has two oscillators per voice, 31 selectable wavetables, and a 24 dB/octave analog lowpass filter. That combination is the whole design. The oscillators are digital and, by every contemporary account, very stable - no drift, no tuning ritual. The filter is where the warmth comes from, and it is why the Wave doesn't sound like the digital synths that came after it. One period co-review said the analog 24 dB/octave lowpass working alongside the digital oscillators gives the machine the active, sweeping tonal shifts normally associated with subtractive synths, while the oscillators themselves generate far more complex waveforms through additive synthesis of sine waves. The classic sawtooth, triangle, pulse and square shapes are in there too, tucked into the wavetables for anyone who wants the old standbys.
The wavetables are the other half. Each program draws on one of 31 wavetables, and each of those comprises 64 waveforms. On at least one machine tested in period, wavetable 31 held two digitally sampled sounds instead of a conventional table. The Wave 2.2 ships from the factory with saxophone and electric piano samples pre-programmed, though it can't sample on its own without the optional terminal and related software. A sweep through a wavetable can be driven by the LFO, the filter's ADSR, the separate AR envelope, or keyboard tracking. How smooth the sweep sounds depends on the table you pick and how hard you modulate it. Some tables transition smoothly between shapes, and others step audibly. That stepping is more a characteristic than a defect.
Where the machine has drawn the most consistent praise is its top end. A studio player writing in a period feature described running the Wave through a console, EQ'ing it +10 dB at 15 kHz, and hearing nothing come through but the EQ module's own noise — clean enough that the outboard was the limiting factor, not the synth. The same player singled out the metallic character of certain sounds as the thing that "blows me away," with the important caveat that it's metallic without being ugly, cold, tinny or brittle, and called out the bass patches as big, powerful and steely. That's the Wave 2.2 in a nutshell: a digital instrument that avoids the thin, glassy stereotype of early digital.
Programming is done through function "screens" rather than a knob-per-function panel, though there are still plenty of analog knobs to turn. Calling up the Analog Screen shows the numeric values of the analog parameters at a glance, and those values update on the display in real time as you change them. That's useful for auditioning and for returning to a setting quickly when a producer wants a sound back. The instrument has one AR-type and two ADSR-type envelope generators, a destination-programmable LFO, patch layering, a multimode arpeggiator, a spring-return-to-center pitch wheel, and selectable output triggers. The keyboard is a five-octave Pratt-Reed, pressure- and velocity-sensitive. There's an eight-channel multi-parameter editing and mixing section for use in sequencer and arpeggiator modes, and a 1000-note real-time polyphonic sequencer with time correction and note/parameter edit modes. On-board storage holds 100 programs, each of which can store two different sound patches, and cassette data storage handles patches and sequences. The display is an 80-character LCD, adjustable for viewing angle.
Two things are missing, and period users said so plainly. There is no portamento or glissando. Players worked around it by setting a slow attack on the third envelope to fake a portamento-like slide. That third envelope is useful for other things too, like adding a pitch slur at the front of brass and trumpet patches. It works as an independent controller in the manner of a Poly-Mod section, without forcing you to compromise your filter or VCA settings. But as the same reviewer admitted, the envelope trick is not quite the same, and long chord portamentos of the kind other polysynths handle natively aren't available here.
The architecture is software-based. Updates to the instrument in most cases required only replacement of software EPROMs, rather than major modifications or a wholesale swap to "this year's model." That was a real consideration for anyone spending this kind of money in the early '80s. The list price was $7,995.00, and Recording Engineer (December 1983, p.101) framed the instrument as offering many of the features of the pure digital machines at a reasonable price, with the Wave 2.2 itself priced at $7,995.00 as one part of a two-part system. It was expensive, but a fraction of what a Fairlight-class workstation cost, and it arrived just as MIDI was becoming the lingua franca of the studio.
Studio integration was straightforward. One scoring rig documented in period coverage ran a Wave 2.2 on channels 5 and 6 of a 20-input console, taking its stereo outputs next to a Jupiter 8, DX-7, TX-7, MKS-30 and Matrix 12, with an Oberheim Matrix 12 acting as master MIDI controller. That same composer preferred to play everything in real time onto tape rather than sequence, using MIDI "quite basically" and combining multiple synths to build textures.
Thomas Dolby's extensive use of a Wave prototype on The Golden Age of Wireless and the Blinded by Science EP did more for the instrument's reputation than any advertisement. The list of studio and stage users in period coverage included Michael Boddicker, Stevie Wonder, Moon Martin, and Missing Persons' Patrick O'Hearn and Chuck Wild. The Wave was, in the words of one 1983 write-up, "the synthesizer hot" in Europe at the time.
A Wave 2.2 is not a maintenance-free purchase in 2026. Four decades on, these are old machines with old machine problems, and anyone shopping for one should budget for service and insist on a full functional test before money changes hands. The Waldorf MicroWave, a later instrument distributed by Steinberg/Jones, was explicitly built to provide the sound capabilities of the PPG Wave 2.2 and 2.3.
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