In case there was a misunderstanding: Definately not despised by me at all. I adore the Wave and some of the other semi-modulars as well.
But I thing the main reason they exist in the physical world is that they can be cheaper? Or smaller?
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@jerrysv I think in the case of the wave, it is semi-modular because some of the effects that are implemented are acting on the wavetable, opposed to simply cascading with the output of the WTO. For instance, the “bend inward” and “bend outward” effects look like they need to know the window of the wavetable. I think there is some band-limiting being applied to the wavetable as well since the effects (I mostly just tested the hard clipper on a pure sine wave) don’t seem to produce aliasing.
@Squinky I believe that in hardware, cheaper and smaller totally makes sense. From a business perspective it also provides that entry level product to modular workflows that doesn’t require building out a rack or knowing much about patching. I think it’s pretty common for people to get into modular with something like a Mother32 or 0-Coast then start learning what other modules they need/want from there.
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Pretty much what Christian says below. They can be great value for money, they can we a very well conceived instrument with a really coherent design and they can be a great gateway in for beginners. Heck, even seasoned pros. I see Chris Meyer and lots of other people with big racks having a M32, or an SV-1 or similar in their racks, and I can easily get it to make sense. The first abandoned design of my eurorack had an SV-1 as the backbone and centerpiece, and I love the sound of that thing. Had I planned a 12U rack instead of a 6U I’m sure it would be there.
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The surge virtual instrument has a wavetable oscillator and large bank of wavetables at its core. That has carried over into our rack implementation with the surgewtosc module. The dsp inside does a lot of work to generate and interpolate a blit stream in a way which has Pleasing harmonics even for small wavetables, and also has a lot of waveshaping controls basically directly carried over from the main synth, may be of interest?
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