“Adding the rackmount Waveterm computer terminal to the PPG system provides even more control and more features, sampling being the main one. The original Waveterm A provided 8-bit sampling, while the ‘improved’ Waveterm B offered the dizzy heights of 12-bit sampling. The maximum sampling time, however, is extremely short — three seconds at a pretty grungy sample rate! But the 24dB filters can treat the samples, so that even though the original samples might be crap, you can do a hell of a lot with them.
Sadly, the Waveterm has no user-friendly WIMP environment. The entire user interface consists of an 80-column text display with two rows of buttons beneath the monitor screen. These act as 10 programmable soft keys, and the display prompts you as to their functions at any particular time. To the right of the case are the two vertically-mounted 5.25-inch floppy disk drives.
Below the disk drives are two knobs: the left one looks after the screen brightness, while the other sets the input level. Audio input is via a 3-pin XLR socket, with a switch to change impedance from mic to line level and a little red LED indicating input overload. A small button marked ‘Restart’ lets you reset the computer whenever it decides to do something on its own — ie. crash!
The rear of the Waveterm features three connectors: the ‘communications buss’ connects the Waveterm to the Wave, while two smaller connectors handle a printer and a QWERTY keyboard.
On power-up, the Waveterm checks its communication buss to see what is connected to the system. The disk drives are of the dedicated variety — the left drive must contain the system disk and the right drive the data disk. If you put the wrong disk in the left drive, pressing the Restart key with the correct disk in the drive is the only way to recover! Once the master disk has booted, you’re presented with the communication management screen, or Page 0, as it is also known.
From Page 0 you can load up the eight voices with samples or wave compound files (wavetables). Unfortunately, this is one of the places where the names have been changed to confuse the innocent. The Waveterm refers to the memory locations where these files are stored as memory banks 0 to 7 (1 to 8 in computer jargon). Just to confuse you, these are completely different from Banks A and B in the Wave!
The rightmost function key is misleadingly labelled ‘Help’. To call up the help files for each function key, you have to press the Help key twice in succession. The first time you press Help you are actually taken to the File menu. From here you can copy; make a new disk; merge samples together; get, store, delete and list files. This is where the Waveterm is really grim. The only way to recall and save files is by entering a combination of highly descriptive digits like ‘T023′, ‘T201′, ‘T803′ etc. Thankfully, the PPG library disks have a whole 80 columns of characters to describe them (OK, 75 if you remove the filename).
Pressing the Page function key followed by a single digit takes you to the selected page (screen), where you can carry out various functions. Waveterm pages are provided for computing waves, creating wavetables, inputting transient sounds (sampling), editing events (sequencing), and so on.
This Unit comes with Boot Disks but I believe require some maintence to get it running. Anyone that has some technical savy should be able to bring this Dream Synth back to life. That being said this unit is being sold as is.” Link
“PPG EVU Expansion Voice Unit module
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