Novation - Summit

Building on the success of the Novation Peak synthesizer, the flagship Novation Summit is a two-part, 16-voice, multi-timbral polyphonic synthesizer with a high-quality, five-octave, semi-weighted keyboard (with velocity and aftertouch); it's perfect for musicians, sound designers and synth enthusiasts alike!

It also extends the Peaks layout, with many hidden controls and functions made accessible on the front panel, including FM routing, LFO 3 & 4, all arpeggiator parameters, and dedicated pitch and modulation wheels. In addition, the Summit offers a host of new filter options, and an audio input for processing external sources with its reverb, chorus and delay effects.

Summit features analogue-sounding NCOs (Numerically Controlled Oscillators), which include 3 new Oxford oscillators per voice, as well as a flexible digital system with 43 digital wavetables with 5 waveforms per line. The instrument also features a variable multi-mode analogue OTA filter with high-pass, band-pass, low-pass and dual-filter selections with 12/24dB slopes. The dual filter offers several routing configurations, including LP to HP, LP to BP, HP to BP, LP + HP, LP + BP, HP + BP, LP + LP, BP + BP and HP + HP. The Summit's sound engine is complemented by analogue distortion, overdrive and digital effects including chorus, delay and part reverb.

At the heart of Novation's Summit synthesizer is a high-power processor called an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) chip, which far surpasses traditional DSP chips. Each of Peak's 16 voices is equipped with an independent oversampling digital-to-analogue converter (DAC). These DACs oversample at more than 24 MHz (24 million times per second), using a simple RC (resistor-capacitor) filter on their output in the analogue domain. Peak's ability to generate waveforms at the oversampling rate (up to 512 times the traditional rate) ensures that Peak's waveforms are pure at all frequencies and free from digital artefacts, no matter how aggressively modulated.