What is all that "warm" "Analog" - "cold" "digital" sound thing about?

[tapiodmitriyevich]

Hi guys,

people so often talk about warm, analog sound. What is this about? From what I understand, people want sounds/instruments with some specific characteristics in it.

- not being 100% precise?
- distortions?
- noise?
- emulation of old age hardware?

I often read, u-he Diva is warm, analogue sounding (I don't own it). X-fer serum is said to be cold. Precise. Digital. I own it.

Now my problem: Modern synth powerhouses (and if not, another track on your DAW) and their envelopes and LFOs can help you add variation, modulation in pitch, filtering, yadda dadda, noise, clicks, attack clicks etc etc. That means, usually we are able to create unprecise (warm? analogue?) sound. I Serum you can do a lot.

So, what is this "analog sounding" vs "digital sounding" about? Is it really a thing? I do not see the light here. I don't have any hardware synths, maybe that explains something.

Thx guys. I hope this is not a flamewar topic.

[dark water]

It is not a thing worth worrying about.

Or to put it another way, if you can answer all these then you've been here too long:

1) Who posted the first phat analog - cold digital post?

2) Did Ed ever come back?

3) Why is Ben #2?

4) What do you make of Knoxville?

5) Did you ever insert a bad fish pun into one of your posts just for the halibut?

[BMoore]

It's about which DAW you use. So choose carefully.

[Daimonicon]

It's just a plain marketing thing. Tell the presuming customers that it sounds digital and clean and you wont sell many plugins. Tell them it sounds warm, vintage and a exact emulation where no one can here the difference between the real deal and their plugins(insert BS here). Tell the presuming customers this is what your mixes deserve and that it will make you mixes sounds professional. Pay pro mixers to say that it does sounds like the real deal and then you've got a big seller.

[fluffy_little_something]

I think it is a psychological thing, like with colors, some colors are considered warm, others cold.

[Vortifex]

..

[tapiodmitriyevich]

OK, what you guys write already tells me a lot I'm feeling better now. Indeed, all that writing "Serum is sooooo cold" almost makes me belief it's a bad synth. But hmm. It's a good synth.
I want to buy Avenger as an all in one solution this year, but already read somewhere that it is soooo cold. As in "so cold, so unpersonal, without a soul, a monster born from the digitalist-capitalist grey men who eat our souls, it will suck out all color and life from anything".

It's about which DAW you use. So choose carefully.

The best one Studio One, my big DAW love.

[MFXxx]

Sonic temperature is a very real phenomenon. IIRC studies showed that music produced with analog synths and/or their software counterparts is around 15-20% warmer. This is why the early vinyl albums from artists such as Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre tended to degrade faster, as the extra heat rendered the vinyl more malleable and thus erosion from needle friction became a problem.

Brilliant post and exactly why vinyl should be stored at a mean constant temperature of no more than 20degrees C.

[chk071]

I often read, u-he Diva is warm, analogue sounding (I don't own it). X-fer serum is said to be cold. Precise. Digital. I own it.

Try the Diva demo, and compare, and find out if you know what the difference to Serum is.

To be honest, i never tried Serum, but, i have Z3TA which i consider as pretty "cold" sounding. What does it have to do with? Well... a solid, thick bottom end, some saturation, some oscillator drift, a pleasant sound when you close the filter, resonant behavior of the filter... among other things. Dune 2 is a great example of quite cold filters too. Dunno, just not pleasant, kind of shrill and harsh, when you compare it to other synth's filters.

[fmr]

Let's see... First you had valves (tubes) which run pretty hot.

We were in Summer.

Then you started to replace them with transistors. Circuits still produced some temperature, but not so much. So, the sound started to become colder.

Winter is coming...

Then, came digital. Digital, as we all know, is just 0 and 1. Circuits became just a soldered board, with surface mounted chips. Basically, no warmness in those cold numbers. That's why digital sounds so cold.

Winter is here.

[yellowmix]

A synth sounding "cold" is not a bad thing. I love Serum precisely for its clean sound. And I also love Diva because of the dirt.

Can fat sounds be made with Serum? Sure! Load up analog waveforms, emulate drift, etc. with the Chaos oscillators, effects, and possibly waste the noise oscillator as an analog noise sample player, and clog the Matrix with a bunch of modulations. And you'll never get the unison voices to drift apart from each other non-equally. Or the non-linearities. But you can get there perhaps 80% of the way.

Likewise, you can turn off the detuning, drifting, etc. in Diva and make it sound cleaner, use the digital modules, etc.. But I've never made it sound as clean as Serum.

The developers took diametrically opposite approaches (virtual analog modelling vs. digital wavetable). But a saw is a saw is a saw, right? There's still a lot going on under the hood, whether it's band-limiting or some other approach. Especially when you get to audio-rate oscillator interactions like phase distortion then you can only trust your ears since you can't see the math.

It basically comes down to workflow. By default, these synths have an inherent approach and you're working against them. Can you? Sure. Should you? If time and effort isn't a big deal. So you create a patch starting point to save you time. But you'll never get to 100% of the way. Does it matter? Depending on your goals, maybe not.

So trust your ears, but recognize they do need to be trained. Also, all u-He synths have never-expiring, fully-functioning demos, so you can download Diva and listen and try for yourself.

[annode]

Concerning digital recording of days past, Kate Bush re-recorded tracks from songs originally recorded digitally...but recorded them to tape because "it's warmer". Why did she not lay these new tracks down to modern digital, you'd need to ask her that. But in any case read this;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Bush ... s_for_Snow

Analog sound is very complex a vibrating piano string is far more complex then a single(digital) oscillator can produce...or typically I'll suppose. The point of warmth is about the acoustic nature and structure of a sound and it's interactions with itself and it's environment that typically make it sound unlike-digital.

[tapiodmitriyevich]

Very good points and hints here, thank you guys.

Yellowmix wrote:

And you'll never get the unison voices to drift apart from each other non-equally. Or the non-linearities. But you can get there perhaps 80% of the way.

I'm definitely that 80% guy, I love to add controlled/random subtle variations in pitch, noise, unison spreading, etc. etc... And I am fine with it. Maybe I will try working with a Diva demo for a while in order to hear, if I ... feel it... if it's worth it, for me. It may be my ears are not as ambitous as yours

I learned to not be too critical about sounds over the years. In the past, I heard every single 0.00001mm of a tape head being off and couldn't enjoy the music then. BTW, technical problems of vinyl which today count as "warmness" were also amongst the things, I did not like at all.
Everybody else didn't care. That's what I dislike also about sound design. It is interesting, but when I listen to music I start to analyse what kind of tools (software, modulation, filters, etc) they use for their sounds. But I don't want to analyze, when I consume I want to enjoy. I must add I am just a hobbyist.

[fmr]

Analog sound is very complex a vibrating piano string is far more complex then a single(digital) oscillator can produce...or typically I'll suppose. The point of warmth is about the acoustic nature and structure of a sound and it's interactions with itself and it's environment that typically make it sound unlike-digital.

Acoustic is not what we are discussing here, I'm afraid. Analog, in the sense used here, means electric continuous signals, opposing to the discrete signals that are produced with digital. Which is more or less a myth, anyway.

Regarding the piano vibrating strings, yes, I agree, but you don't get that complexity with any analog synth either, no matter what. Acoustic sound is a very complex phenomena, and the complexity you get from the sound produced from a piano, coupled with the complex diffusion system of its resonant body, and the room acoustics, is something you will not be able to produce artificially (at least with the current state of the art).

So, it's not where you record the sound (tape, hard drive, whatever). It's more about how well you capture those subtleties (if at all), and how accurate the recording medium is able to reproduce them. All the rest is mythology.

EDIT: Funny thing is that some are pointing DIVA as an example of that "warmth analog sound", which is as digital as anything can be. It's software, how much more digital can something be?

[whyterabbyt]

When synths first started appearing in popular music etc, one the most common pejorative descriptions of them (often from musicians with a more luddite bent) was that they were thin, cold and sterile(*).

That exact same generations of analog synths is now revered, not just for their nostalgic/vintage associations, but for their warmth, thickness, and richness.

Funny that, innit.


* That notion even made them more popular with some musicians who used that to leverage a sense of alienation and dystopia (cf certain British post-punk Ballard-worshipping outfits, just before everything turned into bland plinky Synthpap.)