image courtesy of John A. Trevethan at Antarctica Media

In 1986 Wolfgang Palm "was developing a multi-purpose, all digital music machine." [It] "combined digital sound production, processing, recording, sequencing, and mixing in one system. 'That was a big step into the future,' Palm admits. 'With the Realizer, you sampled something in and it remained in the digital domain inside the machine, so you never lose any quality.'

"Although PPG didn't stay in business long enough to get the Realizer into production, Palm did get it to perform some pretty interesting tricks. 'The Realizer had all four basic kinds of sound generation: an analog model, an FM model, wavetable synthesis, and a sampler. But it never was finished, because it was too big a project. We didn't have the manpower.'"

[excerpted with permission from the book Vintage Synthesizers by Mark Vail, copyright Miller Freeman, Inc]