Novation Peak

I had to think long and hard, and read alot on the internet, before purchasing this one as there is no way to try it out beforehand where I live.

The reasons why I give it only 5 stars is because it deserves nothing less. I've had to send couple of emails to Novation regarding couple of things, and they always replied within 48 hours with very helpful information.

I had to choose between PEAK and DSI Rev2 due to my budget, and I'm very happy I didn't go for Rev2. The main reason? The VCF and audiorate modulation. Yes, alot of audiorate modulation in a poly synth! The FM is gorgeous, FM-ing the filter for some extra dirt is wonderful, and the FX are almost way too good to run PEAK through anything else. Oh, the ringmode is ace too! Plenty of clang! The oscillators are deep and moving, not sterile under any circumstances. Not that Rev2 isint perfectly good synthesizer too, but having 4 lfos with no delay/fade in/fade out is kind of weird, and I'd rather have 2x full featured lfos than 4x with less options.

The online community around the PEAK is also good and growing too so you won't be alone facing your problems, find the facebook group, alot of friendly people to help you out.

One last thing, i've not ran into any serious bugs yet, and that alone is very valuable as many hardware users should know. If you need a flexible sound designing polysynth with beautiful VCF, give PEAK a change. Seriously, that VCF is amazing.

I absolutely love this synth. For those worried it's too digital or VST-like, don't be. Accounting for the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, foldover distortion from overtones, and complex harmonics from modulation, 192 kilohertz would be plenty for accurate sampling. This synth's oscillators are sampled at 12.5 times that at 24 megahertz. Aliasing just isn't a concern here. They're digital, but extremely smooth.

Being digital, the oscillators stay perfectly in-tune, but with voice diverge (basically pitch-drift) and filter-diverge settings, you can do convincing classic patches as well, particularly brass and keys.

The analog filter is extremely smooth and the resonance can cut through the mix, but doesn't sound particularly aggressive. The filter overdrive can help bring out some harmonics, but mostly it does light saturation. The distortion actually sounds more like an overdrive to me. I usually mix filter overdrive and distortion together if I want a gritty sound.

The chorus and delay are fine but nothing to write home about. The reverb, though, is absolutely gorgeous. It's got a lush, airy quality that fits nicely in a mix, so much so that I wish there was an external-in jack so I could route other audio through it.

I first thought the animate buttons were a gimmick, but I use them pretty often for adding accents to notes (animate = level or distortion) or manually rhythmic-gating effects like reverb.

My only gripe is that I wish I could upload more than 10 wavetables to it, or delete some of the factory ones I don't use as much.

All-in-all, it's an extremely versatile synth, and the one I reach for first 90% of the time when making music.

The Peak works great live and in the studio.
After half a year of touring with it, these are my thoughts:

+ Oscillators sound phat, great filters, great modding capabilities.
+ The effects in spite of being digital, are very high quality. The reverb has a surprising depth.
+ All necessary knobs are within reach. No annoying menus or extra buttons to go through for live tweaking.
+ Emulating vintage synths is easy without the weight, buzz or noise.
+ Good price for an analog polyphonic synth.
+ Feels sturdy and is easily road-ready in a simple case.

- The knobs look slick but are very annoying in a live situation. There's no way of seeing the values of the knobs in a darker environment unless by turning them and watching the values on the display. This is due to their color and their form. Knobs of e.g. the BassStation II are way more handy.
- Somehow all output values are displayed except for the Volume. This is very annoying in the case of very dynamic music.
- I would like to have a little more destinations in the modding section. A lot is possible but e.g. panning, reverb, delay is missing here.

The great allarounder. The sound of this hybrid synth is amazing. The oscillators are FPGA and are super stable and very flexible in terms of waveforms and modulation. Their clock is so high you just can't hear anything digital there.
Very clean layout, everything is placed where it is supposed to be and the menu offers in depth sound design with many options. The filter sounds absolutely amazing in any state and the effects are gorgeous, all 3 of them. Bonus feature the mod matrix for the effects, opens up a new sonic territory for experimentation.

Novation has built a reputation of further developing their products, releasing new firmware updates. Peak has already come a long way since its debut and it keeps getting better.

I love it, it will never leave my studio.