What makes analog so analog?

[seamoss]

i agree as well.

I love vsti's but it always blows me away when you have people argue that there isn't a difference in sound and it is only about nostalgia.

it makes me believe that they haven't actually used an analog hardware synth or they are a vsti developer.

hopefully in the future we will finally be there. i think the g-media and the arturia stuff is the closest at the moment.

[meister eder]

Wow, is this discussion still going on!

Here's some more food:

Apart from the fact that instantaneous feedback is under no circumstances possible in the digital domain (while it is in the analog domain),
Digital can not and will never be able to produce real randomness. If you doubt this, let a mathematician explain it to you.

My apologies, if it was mentioned before on the last 15 pages.

[foosnark]

Ok right we seem to have some guy's who deny or refuse to believe that analog has something that digital just doesnt have yet.

It's not about db for db or volume...it's a certain amount of body an analog oscilator has that a digital 1 does not.

Okay, you're talking purely about a single oscillator here, no filters or anything else to cloud the issue?

I don't think there's anything magical about an analog oscillator that can't be done with the right digital gear/software. Maybe to satisfy people with superhuman hearing or a "golden ear" it would require an extremely high sample rate and bit depth and some very subtle other stuff going on. Since I don't have that kind of ear myself, and there is no convincing scientific proof that digital audio is inherently flawed (and if so, why are we recording music with computers instead of tape?), I can't help but think it's just some kind of placebo effect.

Also there seems to be this idea that analog is simply better than digital, without necessarily recognizing that the quality varies extremely widely within both the analog and digital realms. I don't think I've ever heard anyone call the unadorned output of a 555 timer chip "warm" or "creamy" or other melodramatic orgasmic adjectives.

On the other hand, people do praise the sound of Mattel Synsonics drums, so it's pretty much all subjective anyway.

[whyterabbyt]

dr.wackler quoth
Digital can not and will never be able to produce real randomness. If you doubt this, let a mathematician explain it to you.

No, it cant produce it. But it can utilise, say, a value derived from the onboard clock of a PC to generate a random seed which is guaranteed to be non-predictable.

[Robert Randolph]

i agree as well.

I love vsti's but it always blows me away when you have people argue that there isn't a difference in sound and it is only about nostalgia.

There is a difference, and that's what makes the nostalgia argument valid. IF there was no difference, it wouldnt be nostalgia because the past, present and future would all concur.

[Sam C Spacey]

Mate I live in a nightclub with access to 30k pa full range rig 100 feet from the studio. I have hooked up my vsti's to the rig and also played the minimoog whilst setting up for a gig. There is a big difference. You only have to listen and feel in your gut. And no it's not just bass, the vsti's sound like glass,where as the analog sounds like wood. I know that makes no sensce but its the only way I can describe it. Have you actually heard a real analog Moog low C oscilator LOUD. Will make you shit yourself.

It's not magic but it is something. At 44.1khz csti's are like weak lemon drink...at 96khz they get a lot better mainly due to aliasing not chucking its shit all down through the harmonics...try transposing a square wave in kontakt more than an octave and see what I mean. It's like people who kill vocals with melodyne or compress the shit out of a song with Waves L2... analog has subtle things that digital does not.

[Robert Randolph]

aliasing can be heard below 20khz though. and so can other artifacts

uh? aliasing from what? the data on the CD is 44khz, if it contains aliasing, I don't see how you'd remove it, nor detect what's aliasing and what's music.

For an audio app/plugin programmer you seem to be quite a noob to what is considered pretty basic DSP knowledge. Spectre aliases are an artifact of D/A (and A/D) conversion, they don't exsist in the original signal. The LP filter removes them.

Visually -- it removes jagged edges making (ideally) your sinewave all smooth & shiny, instead of being like a weird perpetual staircase.

These artifacts (repetitions of original spectre), allthough they fall above 20KHz can be heard and have effect on listening. EVERY D/A converter has antialiasing filter after it, well except some extremely simple ones used for generating some simple voltage levels etc. but all audio D/A anyway, and some (like Sigma-Delta or some oversammpling 96/192KHz ones) have another FIR (much alike your sincxx FIR filter) or IIR filter before the conversion stage.

@sami: BassStation (as well as K-Station, A-Station, SuperNova etc) is completely digital. Liquid Analogue is just a name for proprietary DSP analogue modelling technology. Everything else you read is utter BS.

Not only are you mostly wrong semantically (concept is there), gol is no idiot or noob. As much as I hate to say it.

[foosnark]

Digital can not and will never be able to produce real randomness. If you doubt this, let a mathematician explain it to you.

"Real randomness" is a theoretical thing. Whatever you may hear in analog circuits isn't "real randomness" but extremely chaotic behavior.

Whether the ear can tell the difference between "real randomness", Mersenne Twister psuedorandom numbers, run-of-the-mill C runtime library psuedorandom numbers, numbers generated by sampling atmospheric noise picked up by a radio, the timing of radioactive decay, etc. is extremely questionable as well.

[Joxer the Mighty]

Also there seems to be this idea that analog is simply better than digital,

I think this is where this type of thread gets derailed, both sides get defensive. Maybe there wouldn't be so much disagreement if it was just stated that there are sonic differences between analog and digital without claims of one being better than the other.

[Robert Randolph]

dr.wackler quoth
Digital can not and will never be able to produce real randomness. If you doubt this, let a mathematician explain it to you.

No, it cant produce it. But it can utilise, say, a value derived from the onboard clock of a PC to generate a random seed which is guaranteed to be non-predictable.

Anything derived from a clock can be predictable given the seed (the time in point where the clock is sampled) and the algorithm... such routines are pseudorandom simply because they lack complete unpredictability.... though in use it's of course it's perceptibly and practically random. just semantics again really...

[Kraku]

And no it's not just bass, the vsti's sound like glass,where as the analog sounds like wood. I know that makes no sensce but its the only way I can describe it.

Heh Funny that you say that, since I actually thought exactly that "sounds like wood" thing when I bought my KLC and tweaked the MS-20 for awhile (most noticable at high resonance when it distorts). So maybe Korg actually got it right?

And I would define the sound of many (not all, note!!!) VSTi's more like plastic, rather than glass. Glass reminds me of shimmering sounds or something...

[Sam C Spacey]

The MS-20 vsti filter insert is very good at 96khz...very close to my funkaduck analog ms20 filter pedal. At high resonance tough it sounds digital. It's just the isc are a bit weak. Listen to "Flat Eric" Mr Oizo and ty to get that sound out f the vsti. I wish they would just sample each note of the analog synth for like 20 sec loop to capture the rawness as it just doesn't have the balls otherwise.

[whyterabbyt]

Robert Randolph quoth

Anything derived from a clock can be predictable given the seed (the time in point where the clock is sampled) and the algorithm...

Ummm, are you sure? Just the fact that your machine can never boot at the same point in space/time twice in a row means that sampling the realtime clock for the first time on any given boot-up is non-predictable from boot to boot.

such routines are pseudorandom simply because they lack complete unpredictability....

For the reasons above, Im not sure about that. The random-number generation is pseudorandom in and of itself, but when provided with an unpredictably non-repeating seed, I would hazard that they do lack predictability. And if one resamples that seed (or another, say the current onscreen raster position of your display) at pseudorandom intervals I'd really like to know where the predictablity comes from...

though in use it's of course it's perceptibly and practically random. just semantics again really...

True.

[Robert Randolph]

Funny enough It seems people are talking about feel than sound now...

wood, plastic, glass.. you cant hear any of those Ironically those happen to be materials most synths are made of... wood/metal = most "succesful" analogs, plastic = most digital synths and VSTi boxes (cpu or actual box). It's a weird coincidence if it is indeed one.

Sounds harsh, deep, pleasant, distorted, noisy... At least most people can relate to those worst slightly better than a physical reference to "feel"

[seamoss]

lets just embrace them both...



analog digital



friends forever