Take into consideration that HALion and Nave don’t read WAV wavetable files directly, they analyze and resynthesize the audio file into a wavetable in their own format. Sometimes, the translation doesn’t go though as smoothly as we would expect (for example, the wavetable ARR was translated very differently in NAVE, although the sound doesn’t differ much). Also, the wavetable “TOMita”, which was created in Icarus, wasn’t read directly bu Serum, so I had to import the audio and create a new one. This led to a somehow different wavetable. I had to go into extensively tests and reading to be able to faithfully translate the wavetables in HALion, but now I think I finally got it.
The “synths” in these recordings are Falcon, HALion, Hive, Icarus, Nave, New (an unreleased new wavetable synth, which I don’t say more due to NDA), and Serum. I recorded three wavetables: PPG Wavetable #01 (purely synthetic), ARR (a wavetable created from a recording of the famous ARR sound of the Fairlight), and TOMita (from a very small audio fragment of Tomita’s “Pictures at an Exhibition").
I tuned the preset so that all synths play the PPG wavetable more or less at the same speed. I was convinced that would make the other two wavetables to also play at the same speed. It happened it wasn’t quite so. I could go on, and create a new preset in each of the synths for each wavetable, but I had already spent too much time with this already. Anyway, I think this is enough to give a rough idea of the similarities and differences between the synths. These are almost unnoticeable in the PPG wavetable (naturally) but are more noticeable in the ARR one, and even more in the TOMita one. I also have to say that Hive didn't perform as "synthetic" as I recalled from previous approaches
I leave to you the comments and judgments. I have my own, of course, but I will not go further right now, except to reinforce what I already said twice: There is no “right way” to do wavetable, and that’s why all wavetable synths are slightly different. This isn’t bad, IMO, quite the contrary.
First, the PPG wavetable in all the seven synths:
Falcon WT PPG
HALion WT PPG
Hive WT PPG
Icarus WT PPG
Nave WT PPG
New WT PPG
Serum WT PPG
Now the ARR wavetable in all the seven synths:
Falcon WT ARR
HALion WT ARR
Hive WT ARR
Icarus WT ARR
Nave WT ARR
New WT ARR
Serum WT ARR
And finally, the TOMita wavetable in all seven synths:
Falcon WT TOMita
HALion WT TOMita
Hive WT TOMita
Icarus WT TOMita
Nave WT TOMita
New WT TOMita
Serum WT TOMita
