Analog vs Digital Debate - What does everyone prefer?

[HAL76]

i can sometimes hear a difference in analog vs virtual analog vs digital, but often i cant, very often i cant for analog vs virtual analog, but fm is one of the things where i often can tell

I'll agree with that and take it further. I haven't ever heard any sw or hw digital synth do decent osc sync or cross mod. It's usually just really nasty and obvious. As you mention FM - also audio rate mod - quite often even analogue synths use digital for stuff like envs and LFOs - for envs I'm perfectly happy with that, but audio rate digital LFOs can sound really crappy too. A lot of the other stuff, digital can have some great advantages. But in certain aspects analogue and digital do NOT sound the same. Some day they might.

J8s crossmod sounds surprisingly fine, but this vst will guzzle you CPUs for breakfast.

But you're still optimistic right? They ll never sound the same since they all sound different and will always.

[foosnark]

Intellijel Shapeshifter does all kinds of sync and crossmod stuff and sounds gorgeous doing it. (Some of the sync modes are harsh, some smooth.)

It's running on an FPGA at megahertz sample rates, maybe that makes the difference.

[BONES]

digital fm can be great too but if youve done analog fm with a dixie or something you can hear a big difference

A "dixie"? Last time I looked, a dixie was something you ate from when you're camping. And if you're talking about the iOS app, it's a digital emulation of the DX7, which itself is wholly digital.

but for fm i can still personally hear a big difference and i personally prefer analog fm

Really? And which analogue FM synth in particular do you prefer? Because, AFAIK, the only way to do it effectively would be with a fairly complex modular set-up, which means no patch memory or anything else useful.

i can sometimes hear a difference in analog vs virtual analog vs digital

Of course you'll hear differences, you'll hear differences between every synth ever made and any other synth. Otherwise we'd only need one synth. And I'll bet you only hear differences when you know what it is you re listening to. In blind test, I'll guarantee you couldn't pick one from the other.

It doesn't sound as good as any analogue synth I ever heard. That was easy. it sounds steppy, horribly thin and full of grainy digital noise and distortion in the worst possible way. I genuinely think that sounds pretty bad.

Bad-ass! I've owned more than a dozen analogue synths in my time and none of them could come anywhere near sounding this big. Not even close. And I'll bet you can't point us to anything that does, either. I've listened to it at full volume through my studio monitors and I can't hear any stepping at all. The cutoff movement isn't even but there's no stepping. And of course there's distortion. The hint is in the name of the clip.

Polyphony in unison? Nah - I never want to fill the whole spectrum with one single sound.

This doesn't make sense. Unison doesn't take up any more of the frequency spectrum than a single voice, because it's the same voice repeated. And a few voices of unison can greatly enhance a string pad without drowning out anything, even with complex chords. Invader 2 has a couple of nice examples of this (I think, unless I added the unison to the presets I started with). Unison fattens up a sound in all the same ways that an unstable analogue osc does, only moreseo.

I haven't used multi-timbral synths in decades...especially in the digital age with DAWs, cheap plugins etc

You're really just making my point for me because if you have to go to a DAW and plugins, then you're proving the inadequacy of analogue.

I won't ever want what you want in synths. Complete opposite usually...actually, a very powerful monotimbral mono (can be multi-oscillator) with one voice, is more what I actually use and want every day of the week. I don't want it to play hundreds of notes at once

Me, either. Quite notoriously, I'd have thought. But it's not about me, it's about what's real.

I don't want to have to use 16 of its voices to get a powerful sound when one will do

That's just lame because a) it doesn't work like that, b) three or four voices is often enough to get the right effect and c) by this logic you wouldn't want multiple oscillators in your synths, either, as they are a lot more work than unison.

and I don't want it to sound tinny and metallic.

Says the man with an OpSix and a Wavestate.

It has never been and never will be objective.

It's completely objective at my end. I hear only what's there.

You want what you want

This aspect of the discussion isn't really about what anyone wants. After all, I have several analogue synths, several digital (hardware) synths and even a couple of hybrids. But I didn't choose any of them because they were analogue or digital or hybrid, I chose them because I liked them at the time. Of course, once I got them home and set up with my laptop, I realised that none of them can hold a candle to even some of the free VSTis I use every day but they look good on stage and old habits die hard. Actually, Rocket and Ultranova probably do hold their own against my VSTis but they're the only ones. The rest are just eye-candy.

Those Cobalt thingies seems to have a good name - bloody hell though...they sound tinny.

I don't think much of them, but then I don't think much about any Moog synth, either. It's not a digital v analogue thing, it's just the differences between different instruments.

[j wazza]

digital fm can be great too but if youve done analog fm with a dixie or something you can hear a big difference

A "dixie"? Last time I looked, a dixie was something you ate from when you're camping. And if you're talking about the iOS app, it's a digital emulation of the DX7, which itself is wholly digital.

but for fm i can still personally hear a big difference and i personally prefer analog fm

Really? And which analogue FM synth in particular do you prefer? Because, AFAIK, the only way to do it effectively would be with a fairly complex modular set-up, which means no patch memory or anything else useful.

intelligel dixie (or rubicon), you dont need that complex a set up

there are lots of analog synths with fm, arturia minibrute, moogs, lots of them, as long as it has through zero or linear fm, or exponential fm with hardsync, you can get great fm sounds

[j wazza]

ok, who can tell which is which?

https://bezmusic.bandcamp.com/album/blind-test

feel free to post other blind tests, its sometimes very hard to tell but i think here its obvious

[BertKoor]

A "dixie"? Last time I looked, a dixie was something you ate from when you're camping.

I'll skip lunch then, thank you.

Screenshot_20220501-163917_Opera.jpg

[imrae]

It has been interesting starting to design my own modules. I have one design in progress that was originally inspired by analog parts but in the end will be mostly digital; as the requirements developed it became obvious that the digital approach would work better and be simpler to design and build for comparable cost. There is one part of the design which is more challenging in digital (a soft clipper) and this will be easily and cheaply implemented in analogue domain.

This is the way! Pictures please!

I'll try to write them up as I go Just finished writing-up my first module, which is an analogue distortion. Audio/video might have to come later, I don't have a tripod for my phone camera. Second module is done, write-up to follow. The digital one now has a fairly solid concept and initial prototype; I'm figuring out the panel wiring at the moment.

https://phaseboundary.com/2022/05/01/eu ... ope-thing/

Ok, write-up done for second module: https://phaseboundary.com/2022/05/01/eu ... -compara4/

This module is a nice example of something that could be done in digital; lots of Eurorack logic modules use microprocessors and support a wider range of logic modes. However, the limited digital sampling rate limits their capability at audio rates and leads to filtering and/or aliasing effects. You could solve that by running at 96 kHz, interpolating to find a sub-sample threshold point and applying a polyBLEP... but that needs a comparatively fancy ADC/DAC and microcontroller, compared to the simple and inexpensive CMOS chips I used.

(There would also be a trade-off between antialiasing and latency, as the BLEP wants to introduce a ripple before the step function.)

[BONES]

intelligel dixie (or rubicon), you dont need that complex a set up

Exactly what I said - modular, no patch memory, a compete waste of time.

there are lots of analog synths with fm, arturia minibrute, moogs, lots of them, as long as it has through zero or linear fm, or exponential fm with hardsync, you can get great fm sounds

Not with the kinds of simple ADSR envelopes you get with analogue synths, you can't. You get a subtractive synth sound with cross-mod, which is not what people think of when you say "FM". I think of cross-mod more as a reason wavetable synths are unnecessary.

I'll skip lunch then, thank you.

The "i" is all-important.

[vurt]

e.

[j wazza]

intelligel dixie (or rubicon), you dont need that complex a set up

Exactly what I said - modular, no patch memory, a compete waste of time.

there are lots of analog synths with fm, arturia minibrute, moogs, lots of them, as long as it has through zero or linear fm, or exponential fm with hardsync, you can get great fm sounds

Not with the kinds of simple ADSR envelopes you get with analogue synths, you can't. You get a subtractive synth sound with cross-mod, which is not what people think of when you say "FM". I think of cross-mod more as a reason wavetable synths are unnecessary.

those are the disadvantages of analog in terms of workflow and the reason i prefer using digital but analog can sound great so its not a complete waste of time,
fm means frequency modulation which you can often do with a crossmod knob so yeah that is fm, sometimes it sounds like a different kind of fm because it goes out of tune but you can use hard sync to get it back in tune, and some synths with linear fm like the arturia have fm that can sound in tune anyway
complex adsrs arent necessary for fm but you can use digital envelopes or even send midi cc from your computer

[V0rtex]

Raw sound - Analog,
Modulation - Digital,
so I think mix of both is great in the works.

IMHO -if the money is no issue, I will go fully into analog Synthesizers, they just sound different/Organic almost like real/acoustic instrument....

[kobal]

digital( wavetable) + analog in the same synth but not many are great yet it seems.

digital wavetable osc ..compared to a synth vco...the digital wavetable osc will be more useful 75 pourcent of the time for me.