Analogue Versus Digital

#1

IMPORTANT :
Please note that despite the title, this thread was originally part of another thread and was not intended to be an Analogue versus Digital debate, but rather my opinion as to why digitally modeled instruments will always be restricted to the quantized nature of a digital system.

Regards the talk about modeled instruments Vs real ones etc, I've held off talking about that for a very good reason, but in the end I feel I need to say my bit about it. It's gonna be long one, so maybe grab a coffee for this one if you fancy listening to my ramblings!

Being an Axoloti user I can imagine I come across as one who is generally ok about digital instruments. Fact is though, I went through a period where I pretty much hated "digital" instruments of any description. It wasn't due to any specific synthesizer though, it was simply due to playing music on a cassette deck (analogue of course) - and realising that digital audio is never going to sound and behave like that.

I was wise enough to hang on to my analogue gear and have been buying even more lately. Digital will never better the real thing. Nothing that is quantized (digital) can be more natural than something that is not quantized (analogue). People argue that it's not as simple as that, well yes it is as simple as that. The only reason they argue it's not as simple as that is because they have no argument. They lose each time because digital audio is quantized no matter what resolution it is, that's what digital is. It's a stream of digital levels played back at high enough speed to fool you.

Analogue isn't out to fool anyone, analogue is the real deal. Analogue is not quantized fakery, and we all know what digital means don't we? That's right chaps, it means it's fake. They might as well call the technology "Fake", because it means exactly the same thing as "Digital" when it comes to audio - or in fact anything.

Digital = Fake = Fact

So when it comes to modeled instruments (digital), I'm going to be the first to agree that no matter how far it advances, it will always suffer the same misfortune of being fake, just like the technology that powers it. This is a fact given that no matter how hard you try, something fake is never going to be real; a modeled violin is never going to be a violin.

But it's not all bad, cause while I laugh at people who don't understand why Analogue technology is superior to Digital, I have gathered quite a fondness for Digital technology lately. My fondness for it though (and you're not going to like this), is based upon the premise that digital should be used for what it's actually good at - (low fidelity).

The LinnDrum is a perfect example of this. It's blatantly digital and low-fidelity, but I love it, and here is where digital interests me, cause for me, digital is best placed being blatantly digital. As long as it's not trying to be analogue (which is never gonna happen), then I'm generally fine with digital for certain things. So I love digital when it falls into that sweet-spot of being crunchy and low-fidelity, but no so much as to render it with blatant artefacts.

My only other love for digital is recording it in analogue. Recording stuff like a LinnDrum and some of those early low-fi samplers like the Fairlight, in analogue, is one of the best combinations ever (it's why most music recorded in the 80s blows the socks of the stuff recorded today). So what I'm saying is, just like a violin is best suited to being played in the way it is, and a piano is best suited to being played in the way it is, digital is best suited at being what it is (quantized). It's only when it's trying to be something it will never be, that I generally hate it.

Take the vinyl record. The format was around long before I was born and it will still be around long after every one of us are dead. It's an analogue format, and the reason it will survive is because it's good, honest technology. You can make your own turntable out of houshold goods if you wanted to, and now, people are developing their own portable record cutting machines to bring to market - all analogue.

Digital technology has never been that accessible. Axoloti is a dream come true for doing things digitally, but you won't be making an Axoloti out of household goods as you could a turntable. Which brings me to the final reason why real (analogue) will always win over fake (digital) ... it's because it's real, simple as that.

Well I hope the coffee lasted, and that all had the priviledge of drinking real coffee, not digital coffee :grin:

The Holy Grail ? (second reprise)
The Holy Grail ? (second reprise)
The Holy Grail ? (second reprise)
#2

ah, you gotta love analogue snobbery :wink:

digital is not 'fake', it is what it is, which can be many things, of course thats not to say you have to like it, if you don't then pass on it... I personally hate the sound of bagpipes, so I just dont listen to them.

of course when digital technology is used to emulate something else, then again, its personal if its close enough' or not, I think generally its used either for convenience/economic, or more experimentally for its 'malleability' .
(this is where I quite like physical modelling , not to emulate, but potentially to create things that cant exist... of course, that's not to say playing with physical objects and contacts mics etc is not fun too)

btw: just like 'digital photography', there is a point where the technology improves to a point, that its going to be pretty much impossible to detect by a human ear, that's not to say we are there yet... but compare 'digital' now (e.g. u-he repro 1, pianotec) vs digital even 10 years ago, its hardly comparable, and we still in the infancy of many technologies.

then turning back to analogue
what do you mean by analogue? do you mean acoustic/physical?
or do you include 'analogue' synthesizers, if so which technologies are allowed to carry this precious label? are ICs allowed, if so, what about CMOS? DCO's?

also, what about that lovely analogue/acoustic sound that has been converted to evil CD, or god forbid streamed over the internet, rather than played over vinyl played thru cables made my silk worms... is this now fake , or only real if performed by own personal quartet in your living room :wink:

sorry, I'm only teasing, I love going to hear a classical orchestra in a great concert hall,
but I can still also enjoy listening to music in my home, or even over my iPhone. similarly, I can enjoy a good pianist playing on a digital piano whilst also enjoying a Steinway grand piano.

everything has its place... do we really need to judge? to put things in certain boxes ( fake and 'real') ? to generalize?

#3

I'm not really interested in judging who's a "musician" or who isn't.

I'm not more interested in judging "digital" vs "IC solid state analog" vs "transistor solid state analog" vs "real warm triode valve analog" vs "electro acoustic instruments" vs "real natural acoustic instruments"...

Nevertheless, the fact is that in the mid 90s, digital synthesis claimed naively to be superior to analog.
This was utterly wrong, mostly because of ALIASING and poor implementations of filters (steppy resonance and zippy fast modulations).

On many aspects, nowadays digital synthesis algorithms are much more mature and take advantage of more advanced anti aliasing algorithms.

#4

this is pretty common with technology, the 'vision of the future' is often too optimistic, premature... where are our flying cars? domestic cleaning robots? ... unfortunately I think these days, its made much worst by marketing hype, every minor step is a game changer/revolution, its all about making sales.

#5

Dear Lokki,

All points are true but what I mean is that the technology itself is not the problem. Nowadays one can for instance even reintroduce perfect pitch. It has actually already been possible since the early 80ties when tuning tables became available.

Knowing that you yourself play in an orchestra explains a lot. You are then obviously very trained in hearing small differences in a a fully acousitc environment while people like me are much more used to only listening to stereo recordings (alythough I played in a brass orchestra when I was young and that also shaped my love for deep enveloping sounds

What I am trying to say is that your perception is very finely tuned. In that respect technology has not reached full maturity yet. At the same time however most people, me including, did not go in a big way for dolby surround. Most do not even hear the differece between MP3 and full linear WAV.

So point taken. And I also consider myself to stand fully corrected on the Hans Zimmer situation. I actually percieve orchetral recordings as most natural when one can hear small variations / imperfections. When peeople are still playing. So in that repect I fully agree. In other aspects I am less crirtical. When a tool can give me a good stereo emulation or better still a sound with near acoustic perception I am already raather satisfied. This poor man understands your critisisms but is still glad he can make use of such fake resources. It's better then composing on paper for live concerts that will never be performed.

What bug me much more is how poor music is composed in spite of all these wonderfull tools being available. In those early 80ties I al;ready mentioned I once read a comment from a music journalist that said that soon every person with the potential to be a new Mozart would be able to develop himself without being in the right paslce at the right ime. Where are all thsoe new time Mozarts then. I am the only person trying to fullfill that potential. And if they do exist: Who the hell is going to listen to them / me?

#6

Dear Axoman,

As always. No qualms with you being practical. What you describe is basically a practical verison of the formant shaping techniques I described in post 66 of this thread. You take a broad spectrum signal and enhance the frequncies in a certain part of that spectrum. Some you might use to create character shaping fixed formants, most of your attention goes to real time shaping of the formants that we all perceive as beign vocal-type.

All hail to the shaper.

#7

I'd have to look into my related PSR-36 to see if anyhting special is ging on but here are a few general pointers.

Never ever pull on the cable itself. Always introduce the release force into the connector itself (in this case the white plastic part).
There ar so many connecotr types it is difficult to give a one size fits all soluition. Do at least check if there is not an extra securing solution in place. Ceck all the sides of the connector. Are there parts that must be clickled, folded or slidden away?
Careful prising with a small flat screwdriver might help to do some testing. Small deformations of the platic should not matter much.
It could however also still be a matter of still putting in more force. These things where not really made with servicing in mind.

Maybe you can post a picure here. Ohterwise contact me directly via the contact button on the main page of my website at www.brassee.com and add the picture too your email.

#8

I totally disagree. The love of the LP is the utter example of actually not understanding the whole subject. Analog is often percieved as more beautiful because an analog signal contains harmonic distortion. So objectively speaking what you are actually praising is an analog artefact. In the mean time digital has actually come so far that one can choose to introduce such friendly distortion at will. One can even buy analog tape simulation software. I hate the very idea becuase it basically means people go out of their way to recreate old sounds in stead of searching for an even better sound. It thsu smells of quick fixes to hang on to old stuff for the sake of it.

Using the Linn drum as an example of the limitations of digital is a bit like complaining that a Hammond organ does not sound the same as a pipe organ. The actual conclusion is might be true but has been made irrelevant for this discussion because a Linn drum never could deliver a 96 Khz, multisampeld, round robbin sound, just liek a Hammond becaue of exisiting technical limitations could not fully emulate the behaviour of a blown pipe. By now ther are virtual instrumetns that sound better then what 99% of us could ever get out of a real drumset.

Conservatism for the sake of conservatism is a very negative force because it tends to simplify the truth into halfbaked clichés, thus sidlining the actual essence of the argument.

The president of the USA wil however probably fully agree with you. :slight_smile:

#9

Spot on T-bear! Let me give you a virtual hug, you big, brown, furry thing, you!

#10

But even aliasing can be used to shape sounds creatively. Alasing again introduces inharmonic overtones and thus just another form of distortion. It might not be as pleasing as analog distortion because it does not restrict itself to even harmonic distortion but as an end result in the recorded signal it scientifically speaking basically the samet.

There where also often claims about poor resolution in ealry digital synths, like for instanjce stepped resonance. I could give you an example of a track where I intentioanlly used that very same limitation to create a near arpeggiating effect like a Tibetan singer using subharmonics to shape a melody. So alhtough the claim was correct it has also often been used to paint over lacking programming skills.

A tool is just a means and for me true creativity is to get the best out of the tool whatever it's limitations might be. We do also not complain about a single Stradivari not being able to bang out a polyphonically complex piano piece, now do we!

#11

Absolutely @brasso, some technical flaws can serve as artistic features.

Here is an object that is quite efficient in creating aliasing and imaging :
SyncAliasing object

#12

@SmashedTransistors
That's exactly the sort of take I wish others would take when I see the friendly (and not so friendly) battles on YouTube over Analogue Vs Digital. That's something of a next step for me, getting into the various analogue technologies so that I understand what each type does to the sound. I'm typical of analogue lovers in that I appreciate it as solid, warm, thick and creamy as possible. I like to experiment with different tape types for recording as well.

If you can advise on anything regards the various analogue technologies, as in which would deliver what I describe the most, that would be very much appreciated!

@thetechnobear
When I refer to analogue Vs "fake" I'm being quite general about it, I must admit. But in a nutshell, we need to remember that when sounds travel to our ears in the real world, they travel in analogue form, not digital. Therefore, no matter what people whould have you believe, it is impossible for digital technology to be a superior carrier of sound than analogue. Not only does the sound travel through the air in analogue form, it enters your ears in analogue form, and guess what, your ears are analogue too - 100% compatible with an analogue signal - no conversion necessary.

This is another reason why I laugh at the Analogue Vs Digital thing. We are analogue, and just like a peice of analogue equipment, we're powered by electrical pulses. Switch off the pulses and you're dead, just like an analogue synth when you pull the power. Switch on the electricity, however, and we're a living, organic entity. Analogue equipment is a living, organic entity too (as long as those electrons are flowing). But by it's very nature, digital is not organic. It has no life of it's own, the whole idea behind digital being precision, same after same, time after time, byte after byte. There is nothing organic about quantized precision. The idea of analogue is simply to be pure as can be, and that's what it is, it's as pure as an electrical current can be. To create an analogue current you simply switch on the power. A person has only to put an analogue sine wave Vs digital sine wave though an oscilloscope, to see which is the master of the two. The answer is always analogue - without question.

But to those out there who still aren't convinced who is king, there is one killer fact that I've yet to see anyone even mention, and it is this. Without analogue, digital cannot exist. Digital technology is just a subset of analogue, it's a bunch of analogue components that are arranged in such a way as to create a digital system.

The fact that digital cannot exist without analogue tells you for certain who the daddy is :grin:

@brasso
Thanks for taking a look at the keyboard. I was already going to post a picture but I don't have a camera handy. I'll take the back off again some time next week and hopefully find a camera I can use.

Regards the "Analogue Distortion" thing, ahem, and what do you think digital stepping and aliasing is in digital?

That is distortion on a far worse level than any pleasing, natural distortion brought about by analogue technology. It's the very reason why, no matter how fine the resolution of digital gets, it will never sound as good as analogue recordings on a vinyl record or tape. That's why analogue sounds better, the distortion is natural (because it's analogue).

We humans are analogue, so it makes perfect sense that analogue recordings sound better to us, even if some have been convinced otherwise by lies or bad examples. Digital audio is no better for your ears than genetically modified food is for your health. Both are passable, but neither is as good for you as the real thing.

#13

Some fun facts:
A sine wave is a mathematical function and it's the purest signal (from a frequency spectrum point). In fact you can decompose any signal (periodic or nonperiodic) as an infinite sum or sinewaves. If you put a "sinewave" in a frequency spectrum meter (and not in an oscilloscope) and you see any frequency that is not the fundamental, i have bad news for you: you're not listening to a sinewave. You should therefore refer to it as a fake sinewave. Analog equipment tends to produce fake sinewaves, fyi.

Not going into the Nyquist-Shannon theorem because you surely have already heard about it, and ignored it.

However, let's move out of the frequency domain and say you want to listen to all possible sinewaves that a digital 24 bit device can produce: let's do the test with a 440Hz sinewave (because 440 seems pretty democratic) amplitude sweep from 0 to max. A 440 sinewave has a period of 1/440 = 0.023 seconds (23 milliseconds). Given our headroom (2^(nbits -1)) = 2^23 = 8388608, you'd need 2^23×0.023 seconds to listen to all possible sine waves. That's exactly 192397 seconds or 53 hours of ininterrupted frequency sweep for just a 440 hz sinewave. Even if you want to be sure to not listen to any quantization noise and you discarded the first half of the sweep (from 0 to 2^22), you'd still need 26 hours to listen to this test.

As Smashed Transistors said, the problem of digital is that it's much more susceptible to bad programming. An analog oscillator is not simply a timer hooked to a lookup table, it's a complex system that exchanges energy and in a restricted range produces a waveform that's harmonically similar to that of a mathematical waveform. This might not produce the most perfect saw or square or sine or whatever, but it surely will not alias and could sound harmonically pleasing. On the other hand, there are several applications in which a precise signal is essential: it's the case of frequency modulation, but also frequency shifting or more exoteric stuff, where small instabilities will take the sound somewhere else. It's up to you to decide if it's better a digital cold implementation or an analog organic and possibly unstable one .

Another fun fact is this: electrons flow in digital systems too. And a conversion is necessary from any electrical system (regardless of it being analog or digital) to any organic human ear, you don't simply plug a jack inside your head through some orifice.

Regardless of analog-digital wars, i strongly believe that digital open systems like axoloti are absolute winners, not sound-wise, but in a didactic sense. I'll never do anything professionally with music, since i don't have an academic background, and the way i see it, most of the music related market (i'm talking about you too, axoloti!) is just a way to sell stuff to wannabe musicians. So, if i buy some product it must leave me something else other than the ability to make some sound with it. Being able to learn and practice new stuff that i'll probably never use in my life is infinitely more precious than owning some instrument that produces the most beautiful sound ever heard.

#14

But math doesn't tell me what sounds better, my ears do!

The main problem with digital is that it's digital. If you didn't take an analogue signal and convert it to digital in the first place, those problems with digital would be completely irrelevant. Those problems with digital only exist because you have taken a pure analogue signal and converted it into a quantized digital one. That quantized digital signal then needs to be converted back to analogue before our analogue ears can hear it. Obviously, the best thing is for it to be analogue and stay analogue, because the person who's going to be hearing the end result, is also analogue.

You can build an analogue turntable out of a few bits and peices and it willl indeed work completely in the analogue domain. Like I said, it's good, honest technology, and it's just one of the reasons the vinyl record is never going away. From the production of the sound it makes, to the soundwaves arriving at your ears, it remains in the analogue domain. You cannot do that with digital. Simply clapping your hands and someone hearing it is a demonstration of analogue sound production. A turntable works on the same principle. A stylus is vibrated, the result is amplified, and you hear it.

It's that simple, it's as pure and beautiful as it gets.

Now this is where I agree completely. To me, Axoloti is a dream come true, and me preferring analogue technology doesn't change that one bit. But look at the second part of your sentence. Axoloti is amazing, but I know enough to know that it's never going to satisfy me "sound-wise" in the same way analogue equipment does - that would be completely impossible (because it's digital).

I realised when the talk about modeled instruments started, that it would be impossible for me to give my opinion on it without bringing-up the fact that it's never going to compete (sound-wise), with the real thing, or with modeled instruments done on real analogue synthesizers. The reason is simple, it's because you're building your instruments upon a technology that is atrificially quantized. Saying stuff like that on a forum about a digital product is never gonna go down well (cause it might look like I'm attacking the product), which is why I inititally kept out of the discussion about modeled instruments.

But yup, no digitally modeled instrument is ever going to reach the stage where it's doing what a real instrument is doing, or giving the naturallly occuring distortion brought about in analogue systems. It's completely impossible cause it's neither real, or an 'analogue' system - and never will be.

#15

I can imagine by now, that digital purists might be wanting to get their own back on me. Well hang on a bit, cause I got more news for you. This good old analogue device from medieval times is now being recomissioned by Axoman Industries to use on 'Digital Die-hards' who refuse to accept that real is better than artificial, and therefore analogue must be better than digital.

What we do is lock you into the device and ask the question: Who's the Daddy?

  • If you answer correctly 'Analogue is the Daddy!' - then we let you go.
  • If you answer incorrectly 'Digital is the Daddy!' - then we submit you to a little friendly abuse.

Axoman Industries - Because we Live in a REAL World :smiling_imp:

#16

Problem: your ears are not a good analysis device, and you don't want to accept that math is the most real thing that exists.
Nyquist-Shannon theorem says that a signal sampled at twice the maximum frequency can be reconstructed perfectly without any change in its harmonic content, so if all the conditions are met, there's not any "but my ears" that holds. A mathematical proof is valid, period! And if you're so malicious to not trust the proof you can use a proper analysis device to confirm the theory.
Your ears are not a proper analysis device, because don't simply hear what you hear.. The whole hearing experience involves your brain processing sensorial inputs and previous experiences (see placebo effect), so if your belief is so strong that an analog generated sinewave is better than a digital generated one it's probably matter of personal biases.

I'm not saying that digital is better than analog. I'm saying that stating the supremacy of any of the two is just stupid (you know what's a digital device most of the people in the world are born with? Eyes. You only have only a finite numbers of cones and rods in your eyes, does this make them less real?)

#17

Sputnki, I haven't got digital eyes :grin:

Them having a finite amount of cones and rods does not mean they're digital. The tree I see outside the window has a finite amount of branches too, and I can assure you, it's a real tree, not a digital one. My iris is akin to a stepless analogue volume control, and because it's organic and analogue in nature, it opens and closes without stepping, just as expected. 1-Bit eyes would mean either you can see or you can't, and if what you said was true, that would mean by the time the 80s arrived we would have eyes that were still only 8-Bit.

Dude, you're heading for those stocks real fast saying stuff like that!

That has to be one of the most interesting attempts I've seen, Sputnki, but I'm pleased to say I'm completely analogue and therefore my eyes and ears are too. Everything has it's limit, as do my eyes an ears, but they're not so primitive they jump up and down in preset quantized digital values!

It's like when those "digitally encoded" volume controls invaded home Hi-Fi in the 80s. Before they arrived, you would simply grab the analogue volume knob and turn it. This resulted in an immediate response, quick, easy, and perfect. Then digital encoded volume arrived and the knob disappeared. The idea was that you keep pressing the + and- buttons until the volume reached the level you require. This was already completely dumb and pointless, but to make matters even worse, the volume went up and down in preset steps due to it being digital - there was no way to get the levels in-between the digital steps.

It was as pointless as converting analogue signals to digital and then back to analogue, because such things can never be as good as keeping them in the analogue domain in the first place. I think things that are decidedly digital, for example synthesis that is decidedly digital, is fine. But any other use is merely cost-advantage and size convenience.

#18

Ok, let's make a bit of clarity here: digital does not mean "limited to two states only", that's boolean. Boolean is digital, but digital is not necessarily boolean. Digital is an adjective that can be applied to a huge amount of subjects, means "limited to a finite amount of states", and if we don't specify what we're talking about we end up with an improductive conversation.

If i was deaf, i could say that a roland tr 808 is digital because it has a finite amount of knobs and buttons and it is either turned on or off.

Ok, hop on the train because i'm going to explain to you that anything that exists in the world is, in fact, digital:

We're talking about electric signals. You can characterize signals in several ways, based on their excursion and their variability in time. Both can be infinite in theory, but in practice there are some limits. One limit that exists in the universe, and perhaps the most important of them all it's the speed of light. No information can move faster than the speed of light. Since we're interested in eletric circuits that are fundamentally made of wires, wires have a length that depends on the technologic advancements of the time they're made (even though there's a physical limit even for the length of a wire, because wires are made of atoms, atoms are finite and they're spaced apart each other).
Point is: we have a minimum length, we have a maximum speed, we can calculate a minimum time, which happens to be the minimum period of a wave.
The inverse of a period is a frequency: there is a maximum frequency we can achieve... That frequency is still ridiculously high, way higher than we can hear, so analog synthesizers are theoretically safe. I just wanted to demonstrate that nature is limited, at least in time.

Nature is not limited just in time: in fact, as the first principle of thermodynamics says: in an isolated system (the universe is isolated), energy is constant in time. This leads to an infinite (well, actually not) number of implications. One of these implications is that there is a maximum potential between two charges (because energy is finite and matter is just one of the several manifestations of energy, and charge is a property of matter).
So, even if you managed to separate every charged particle in the universe, place them in two separate boxes (protip: you can't, because you'd violate the second principle of thermodynamics), you'd still end up with a maximum voltage.

Electronic devices have still a much lower voltage limit, analog or digital they are.

However, even though we have upper limits for voltages or frequencies, this does not mean that the resolution cannot be infinite, right?
Wrong. Radiation and matter both come in quanta. Back to our eyes: if you were a frog on a spaceship directed outside our solar system and looking to our sun, at some point you would not see the sun anymore as an ever shrinking object, but as an intermittent dot. This is because light is emitted in photons, and what you perceive as brightness is actually the frequency of excitation of your sensors (cones and rods). Also, your sensors can only pick up or perceive some types of light (with a precise amount of energy). The allowed spectrum is very dense, giving you the impression of being continuous, but it's not.
So you have a finite amount of sensors, that can only pick up a finite amount of wavelengths, that come in a finite form. And there is a maximum limit of light, because light comes with energy and energy is finite!
The signal is then carried through some kind of wire towards your brain. Remember what i said before about the maximum frequency of a signal? Exactly. Eyes also have a finite resolution.

But maybe ears are better than eyes, right?
Well, it might be, but in the end whatever crosses your senses is processed inside your brain by a finite amount of neurons.. Your brain tricks you into thinking that reality is continuous and infinite, when in fact it is not. We as humans conceptualized infinity, which is a thing that does not exist in nature.

Does this make the whole experience of life less real? I suspect not.

Back to synthesizers and sounds and stuff: the reason because you feel analogue sounds to be "better" than digital resides in psychoacoustics, which has nothing to do with the medium of information, but with the information itself that is carried through that medium. A bucket brigade delay is a device "analogue" in resolution, but not in time domain, and is subjected to Nyquist-Shannon theorem too. And it still sounds sweet in most cases (and even if it's not subject to quantisation noise, it's still pretty noisy).
The davolisint, on the other hand is full analogue, and it sucks shit. Same thing for the boss metal zone, full analog path, terrible sound at the end.
Have you ever listened to boards of canada? Their is the most organic sound i can think of, and still they used a massive amount of sampling, which is digital stuff, together with analogue devices.

Analog, digital... They're puerile and degrading adjectives. The important stuff is in the middle.

#19

Before I forget, I did indeed get it wrong about the digital Vs boolean thing, but what I was getting at is the ones and zeroes thing; basically the artificial resemblance of reality thing that digital does.

I also totally loved reading what you wrote. I honestly don't know of anyone who put up so much literature on advanced topics to defend digital. I can tell you now, it did not work on me, but l do understand what you're getting at even though half the stuff you talk about goes over my head.

So what you're saying, in laymans terms is that you think analogue is digital, and you say this because you see a change of status in the real world as some sort of on/off switch. If I were to take that as valid then we might as well say a light switch is digital because it's on or off. or maybe turning over in your sleep is digital when you switch from left to right shoulder. That's not digital, it's just a change of status.

But here is the thing that is even harder to swallow. Cause what you say does not take into account that frequency and quantization are different things. If we capture real world images using a digital camera, we get moire patterns because of the quantization. If we capture real world audio using a digital system we get aliasing because of the quantization.

Capturing things in a quantized manner is the problem because the real world is not quantized. The real world is analogue, the real world is about frequency, and there you have the issue, cause as digital camera sensors and digital audio recorders prove, frequency and quantization do not get on at all. They are each others worst enemy. Analogue does smooth flowing signals, whereas digital does quantization.

The analogy I gave about the turntable is a good way describe the analogue Vs digital thing.

The stylus is vibrated, the vibration pushes the cone of a speaker which pushes the air that presses your eardrum. That's as pure as it gets, no conversion needed. You can not do that with digital. Digital needs to be converted into analogue in order for us to hear it. So while all that other stuff genuinely does fascinate me, there's no way on earth you can convince me that it's better to take analogue, convert it to digital, then convert it back to analogue - than it is for it to remain analogue in the first place.

Using a turntable, the sound remains analogue from capturing the words from the singers lips, to it beating down on your eardrums. Those sounds coming from the lips cut the vibrations into the record. Those vibrations then vibrated a stylus that pushed a speaker cone to vibrate your eardrums.

That's analogue, that's the beauty of analogue, and it's why you'll often hear people who appreciate analogue refer to it as "real". Analogue sound reproduction cannot be bettered by digital, it's impossible, because by it's very nature, digital is artificial quantization, it's not smooth and unquantized like pure, analogue audio reproduction is.

Now something else I would like to point out, and this is very important, is that I understand why people hail digital like thay do, and just as important, I understand why the math guys like yourself find digital beautiful. I think to you, digital and math are inseperable, you know this, and you see the beauty of math and what can be achieved with it, that it must result in something superior.

But it doesn't, and the reason it doesn't is because math is basically a way to measure the real world, the analogue world. The analogue world does not submit to any digital theory whatsoever, it's the other way around, because like I said, without analogue, digital cannot even exist.

To prove it, send your digital CD player over to me and I'll remove the digital to analogue converter. I'll return it to you minus the part that makes it all possible for you (the analogue part). Without that digital to analogue converter, all you can do is watch the disc spin. I could never suffer such a misfortune with a turntable, though, cause it's real, it's analogue. It's the purest way to capture the real world.

Analogue - it's what we all are - and why we're superior to robots:

#20

You're wrong when you say that quantization introduces aliasing. Quantization introduces quantization noise (the lower the resolution, the higher the noise), however if you quantize to a sufficient resolution, this noise is irrelevant (like the whisper in the other room when the vacuum cleaner is running). Also every signal (analog too) comes with some noise, noise that has no interesting timbre whatsoever, it might be white noise, could be the power hum or a ground loop...
What you hear as aliasing is the effect of sampling something that goes too fast with a device that goes too slow. But here's the catch: if you exclude (filter) any component of a signal that goes too fast (and would not be heard anyway, we are not dogs), you can sample some signal with no audible aliasing, again like a whisper in the other room when the vacuum cleaner is running.
And if you're thinking: "well, with analog recordings you don't even have to filter anything, so it must be better!", then i must give you a hard truth: phisically objects (see a stylus), have resonation frequencies. The further you get from the sweet spot, the less the obect responds to excitation. So you might have recorded ultrasounds in your vynil, but it's very likely that the stylus won't pick them up, because it can't oscillate at such high frequencies.

I'll say another thing: vynil does not sound warmer than cd because of the format itself, it's a necessity thing: music mastering for vynil is different from music mastering for cd, because vynils have a much lower dynamic range. So the sound has to be squished more, saturated and processed. If you listen to vynil editions of modern cds you'll learn a shocking truth: they sound exactly the same (or worse), because they did not get the correct mastering for vynil.