| I don't know about consensus, but I thought long and hard about the Wave and decided not to buy one. I suspect the Wave's good points are well known by now, so I will just mention the aspects that talked me out of buying one.
1) Not enough sample memory. It has 180MB, which sounds like a lot, but the pre-loaded library takes up 160MB of that already, and there are many more samples available at the Nord website. So there's not nearly enough memory to store all the samples that Nord makes available, let alone adding your own.
2) Strange sample organization. The obvious answer to (1) is to decide which samples you want to use for a performance and load those. However, my understanding is that patches refer to samples by number, which means that there is no easy way to determine which samples are not in use by current patches. If you change a sample that a patch is using, it changes the sound of that patch, so replacing any sample might change the sounds of your patches in ways that you did not anticipate.
3) No multisamples, or so I understand. A sample can have a separate sound for each note, but not for different velocities. So, for example, you can't have a patch that sounds like a flute when played quietly and a trumpet when played loudly. You can cause velocity to affect filters and such, but not to change what samples are playing.
4) No pickup mode on front-panel controls. Suppose you're in a live situation and you want to increase the attack time of what you're playing. The moment you turn the attack knob on your envelope, the attack time jumps to the current knob position. So if the knob is in a position that doesn't correspond to the patch, the sound has just changed abruptly. What the Wave really needs is the kind of rotary encoders that appear on the Lead 3 or G2--or at least a way to set it so that turning a knob has no effect until the knob's physical position passes the current setting.
5) Aftertouch controls vibrato, period. I don't think there's any way to make it change the filter cutoff frequency, for example.
6) I don't think there's a patch editor. Sample editor, yes, but no patch editor.
None of these issues is a deal-breaker by itself, but together I think they were enough to talk me out of buying a Wave, even when they were on sale during the hiatus between USA distributors.
I am hoping that someday Nord will make a product that combines the modular capabilities of the G2 with the sampling capabilities of the Wave -- I'd buy one of those in a heartbeat. |