Of course they are different!
https://novationmusic.com/en/peak-explained
For modern synthesiser instruments, using the combination of analogue and digital makes absolute sense. “In analogue circuits, the non-linear response is where a lot of the magic happens,” says Nick Bookman, long-serving Novation Hardware Engineer. “But digital gives us much more power and control when it comes to the oscillators, modulation and effects.” As such, analogue circuitry provides warmth and character for the filters, VCAs and distortion in Peak. Digital technology provides the control, audio precision and complex processing used for routing, modulation and effects.
That’s Peak in a nutshell — the best of old and new. A real hybrid. But while this blue-sky thinking is imperative to the design, Novation were focussed on making Peak more than just a convenient unity of analogue and digital technology. They had the goal of creating a completely new synthesiser; an instrument that’s greater than the sum of its (analogue and digital) parts. The next step was good old-fashioned innovation.
The FPGA: Higher Ground
Central to Peak is the use of a high-powered processor component called a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). In contrast to traditional DSP chips, which often need to run in pairs or quads, the FPGA is a single processor on which many functions can run — from oscillators to the modulation matrix. The key benefit to an FPGA is that it runs at a much higher rate than DSP-based technology, and this has a direct impact on the clarity of sound.
Each of Peak’s eight voices has an independent oversampling digital-to-analogue converter (DAC). These DAC’s are oversampling at over 24MHz (24 million times per second), using a simple RC (resistor-capacitor) filter on their output in the analogue domain. In itself this is not new technology, but their integration inside the FPGA has enabled their design to be extended to enable optimum waveform synthesis. Because other virtual synths use discrete ‘off the shelf’ DAC chips, which are restricted to running at sample rates of either 48kHz or perhaps 96kHz, they often have aliasing issues, especially when synthesising higher frequencies. Peak’s ability to generate waveforms at the oversampling frequency — up to 512 times the traditional rate — ensures that Peak’s waveforms are pure at all frequencies, free from digital artifacts no matter how aggressively the pitch is modulated.
