Analogue Versus Digital

#62

I agree completely lokki. acoustic instruments do that - just like digital instruments do that.

#63

You mean air????
All air is analogue.

#64

Or do you mean reproduction.
Analog is not superior to digital it is just different.
There is heaps of distortion sources in analog, just as there is in digital systems.
I depends what the system was designed to achieve.

#65

Correct, I do indeed mean air, it's the "analogue" way, it's the very way we humans hear.

It's why I used vinyl and the turntable as a beautiful example of how analogue technology is the purest thing we have. We hear a noise in the real world when it travels by air, then vibrates our eardrums as it arrives at our ears. That's the analogue way, the purest way, it's the same method used in the recording and playback of a vinyl record. It's analogue vibration directly recorded and replayed as sound.

The very thought that the sound-waves that vibrated your eardrums, can also vibrate a cutting stylus that produces a record, is something that should really make you think, because the record heard what you heard using the same technology your own ears used.

Technology doesn't get more direct and pure than that.

This is why those who truly love and understand analogue, enthuse about it so much. It's because such a recording and playback system is quite simply the daddy, to be able to record and replay sound using the same technology your own ears use. To put analogue technology second to anything would be no different than putting your own body second to a robot.

#66

Bollocks...:stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

Vibrations are vibrations, Air is just one of many mediums it can pass through.

I'd love to be a robot, wouldn't have to put up with all this emotional crap... :sunglasses:

#67

The material in the room with you also affects the pure path from vinyl to ear.
Other people in the room will also affect it.
But if you do the analysis of what is happening on a stylus - it is filtering what you hear, just as the amplifier is, just as the speakers are.
If you measure the frequency response of different people, they are different. So is the intermodulation interference in their ears, and the dynamic response. Everyone hears differently.
What you are really saying is that you prefer that sound.

#68

i'm sorry i don't quite follow.

i agree that all instruments will sound differently depending on room (all sorts of absorption, echo, phase cancellation etc.) and amplification (speaker, mixing desk, amplifier, microphone etc...) i can imagine an analog synth reacting to temperature and humidity in a room, so to a small degree an analog synth may also react to the room. but a digital instrument behaving differently in different rooms? (not because you programmed it to be that way) i would be very happy to own such an instrument.

#69

The digital synth will work as programmed.
But air is a very poor transmission medium. It is lossy, and inconsistent.
In a room it is normal to have variations in temperature of more than 5 degrees C from one spot to another.
That means you get signal velocity variations, that means you get phase shifts.
Your sound source is a point source (or maybe a tricky speaker that pretends to make planar sound waves).
That gives you multiple signal paths, varying with frequency. That gives you more phasing problems, signal cancellation, and reflections.
Another person in the room will be a non-uniform attenuator.
A vase will be a non-uniform resonator.
It is all easy to measure and correct if you are using a single frequency source to scan the room from multiple sources to multiple destinations and all relevant frequencies.
If you just use music to evaluate it, then you just get a warm, cold or flat sound, and varying levels of resonance, and damping. That is all that ambience effects do on amplifiers.
But if you look at the effects on multiple tones, rather than a single tone you see what the effect on a musical note is - because musical notes are a collection of frequencies. The more notes in a chord the harder it is to render from a signal (record or CD) and the harder it is to amplify accurately (class A, class D, whatever) and the harder it is to deliver to a listener (someone with ears) and the more variation the listener will have in experiencing the chord (because ears and heads don't work very consistently across the range of humans that currently exist).
In short - it is way more complicated than analog vs digital.
Analog processing has just as many distortion and corruption sources as digital processing. There is good and bad analogue and good and bad digital. If you have ever heard anything good on radio or tv, then it has almost certainly been digital at some stage and analogue at some stage.
Any sound source will sound different in a different room. We tend to adjust our hearing interpretation to suit our environment. We ignore sound differences when we are not listening for a particular sound. When we are listening it is easy to hear what we want to, because we cant swap back and forth between environments.
There are physical and mental obstacles to evaluating performance spaces. That is why some theatres are known as great rooms - they have good acoustics, and a good vibe. It is not just the acoustics.

#70

i completely agree! cool. and i have nothing against digital at all. after all, i own 4 axolotis by now :slight_smile:

#71

I just love this discussion! - anytime!
let me pour some oil into the fire, then. Because, if you're gonna be purist and get right down to it, you'll have to eventually face one fact: nothing is "analog". We live in a universe where energy is quantized. As energy is transmitted to your eardrums, there is a discrete minimum amount by which this energy may differ between two pressure peaks. Around that minimum, it will either cause a reaction or not. Binary. And even if you had ears with infinite sensitivity: whether or not they would react to that minimum change would be left to chance - because it would be chance in the first place which decides whether something they could react upon would actually reach them. Once it does, the "holy ear" would still have to produce an electric impulse of a certain strength and duration (and hence: a certain amount of energy) in response. Only, it could never do so in a continual (analog) way. The result would be evenly divisible by the Planck constant: two, fifty-thousand, 340331-fold...but never smaller than 1 (in which case even our perfect ears would not create a "signal") - or, even more to the point: there couldn't be fractions of a quantum in difference. Even god's ears are digital! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Of course, this is all rubbish. While fundamentally true, it will be of no consequence whatsoever to us mere humans listening to music. If you want sense, read SteveAbx:

That is why some theatres are known as great rooms - they have good acoustics, and a good vibe. It is not just the acoustics.

When listening to music, we're all in for the vibes. Go unpack your battered acoustic next to a campfire you're sitting around with friends. It will sound terrible. But get it right and everyone will be convinced they heard nothing more touching in their lives...

#72

Not bollocks, fact, one you cannot change no matter how hard you try.

You poor thing, I was demonstrating the fact that the same vibration that pushes the air that vibrates your eardrum, is the same vibration that is vibrating the cutting stylus on an analogue record. Technology does not get any more direct and purer than that.

Using the word crap doesn't make you look correct, it makes you look desperate. There's nothing emotional about what I'm saying. Analogue is smoother because it is. Not because of some emotional belief.

I would love for you to be a robot too, then at least I could switch the crap off :sunglasses:

You can talk rough, you can use as many smiley faces as you wish. You can get all of your friends the web over to come here and give you a like for being misinformed, but you cannot change the facts.

@SteveAbx and @lokki
I don't disagree with what you're trying to say, but you're missing the point. What you're describing is that what we hear is the result of the things around us, what's in the room etc. Yes, absolutely, I agree 100%, but what I was pointing out is the way to capture that result. In other words, regardless of what effect the surroundings have, an analogue microphone and cutting stylus will capture that result in analogue. Analogue being the perfect way to do it because the world around you is analogue, and the sound traveled in the analogue domain. That analogue cutting stylus hears what you hear using 'the way of analogue' - using vibration.

Makes no difference what the vibration travels through, it's still done the same way.

It is physically impossible for any other method to be purer than that. You cannot take a real-world (analogue) sound, convert it into computer speak, cut it into tiny peices, convert it back to analogue, then expect that the result will be purer than simply capturing analogue vibrations (in analogue) in the first place!

This is something our robot wannabe, Gavin, will learn eventually.

Peace, my children - love your analogue for it is what you are.
It is your life, and it is your soul :sunglasses:

Anyway, I sense the great wall of attack coming on, and there are far too many people agreeing with nonsense or irrelevance, and not enough people agreeing with facts. This is a forum dedicated to a digital product so I'm not surprised about that. Nevertheless, I'll have to drop out at least for a while. I was supposed to have my Linux box up and running two days ago and haven't even gotten started on the installation yet.

I will leave you all with one simple fact: Analogue is the daddy!

#73

If you want sense, listen to what axoman is telling you. Everything you just wrote completely ignores the fact that something that is man-made and intentionally quantized, is no match for the real-world sound system.

That's what analogue is, it's the real-world sound system!

Ok, I'm really off now, I only just saw your post after making my last one. Just be realistic about it, lads, that is all I am saying. And you are not being realistic if you think conversion to computer speak followed by conversion back to analogue is better than simply keeping it analogue in the first place.

There is no way you are ever going to convince anyone who truly has common sense!
What you're claiming is completely ridiculous and physically impossible.

#74

Nothing in this world is analog. Analog is Maya..

#75

Analog back to front is golana..:grin:

#76

Duh, I get it now - this is an elaborate joke you're all playing on axoman!

I'm expecting the whole lot of you to come bursting through my door any moment, shouting "surprise" and waving banners with "Analogue is the daddy!" written across them!

You peeps are just awesome, you certainly had me fooled :blush:

#77

I love how analog purist always compare an analog waveform drawing against a VERY crude stair stepped drawing of a digital waveform, a waveform than NEVER comes out of a digital device's D/A converter. Stair stepping does not exist. People just tend to draw it that way. Watch this video. It explains what I mean. Analog signal and analog scopes. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM

#78

@Ersatzplanet

That was the most enjoyable YouTube video I've watched in ages. And while I'm still not convinced, watching him made me more aware of why the digital and math guys love the digital thing.

Now be honest, you saw first-hand a side-by-side demonstration of two instrumets in that video. You saw how the analogue oscilloscope behaved and how the digital one behaved. Is there anyone here who can honestly say they prefer the feedback of that "modern" digital display to the smoothness of the analogue scope?

And is there anyone here who can honestly say they prefer the laggy performance of the "modern" digital oscilloscope over the immediate, silky-smooth performance of the analogue scope?

Give me a break - I'll take the analogue scope any day (especially for working with audio). I'd rather pay ten times the price for the analogue scope than the digital one. You can see, right there, the difference in performance between something that is using real-world physics as opposed to something that's using a man-made quantization system. It's a perfect example of how analogue shines!

I really don't know how many times I have to point this out, but analogue does not need to go through that conversion of A-D and D-A in the first place. So you see, he's basically just waffling-on about a technology the analogue purists couldn't care less about. Analogue purists couldn't care less about that stuff, they have no need to care about it because they know analogue equipment does not need any involvement with digital technology whatsoever.

People are free to listen to guys like him and be mislead by it, but I won't be. Common sense should tell you all that if analogue has no need for digital, but digital cannot exist without analogue, then analogue absolutely must be the daddy!

It's like in that video I posted earlier about the Arturia MiniBrute. There's a part where he says "I've got a few other synths which I won't mention. They're supposed to be analogue and they don't sound it. You can tell streight away that they're digital.". The MiniBrute on the other hand has no chance of sounding digital, because it isn't digital, it has a 100% analogue signal path, you can tell it has just from the sound of it.

"This sounds analogue ... it is, exactly ... that's exactly why it is!"

Analogue is the daddy! :grin:

#79

Speaking for myself (someone who designs analogue microphones for sound analysis) I can tell you that analogue microphones do not capture the pure pressure waves that we hear, and those pressure waves are not transferred to vinyl to be purely replayed to us.
Analog is just like digital - its distortion, delay, intermodulation interference, bandwidth limiting, dynamic range loss.
Everything you accuse digital of doing.
Digital lets us make lower fidelity more easily. We can do it with analogue but there is more control with digital.
We can make a specific low fidelity that we like with digital.
We can all make hi fidelity and we can make it adjustable.
You cant do that with analogue.
You can make hi fidelity with analogue, or any other fidelity - but not with the control and low cost that you get with digital.
Either way - don't think either of them is pure.

#80

I prefer a digital scope any day.
Analogue scopes are not accurate enough. They give a nice smooth waveform because that is what they are designed to do.
A digital scope has a very clearly defined performance that makes the results much more realistic. An analog scope doesn't show when it is distorting the signal because it can't show more detail.
A digital scope can react much faster than an analog scope and much more smoothly.
It depends on what you set it to show, and how good each one is for the measurement you are trying to take.

#81

Sorry, this is driving me ever so slightly nuts now ...

How on earth can any of what you just said be true? I've never seen a digital scope in my life that behaves anywhere near as well as an analogue scope does!

And the really annoying thing, the most unbearable thing of all is that you still don't get it - but why?

Everything you just said can be blown-down like a matchstick house quite easily. All I have to do is remind you that the "digital" scope you think is superior and the "digital" audio you think is superior is based on analogue technology. Those digital systems you love so much are built from analogue components, therefore, digital is just a subset of analogue technology - and cannot exist without it.

So there you have it, analogue not only has the benefits unique to analogue, it also has the razor-sharp precision of digital if you want all that precision control you talk about. Just lay-out the analogue circuit in such a way as to create a digital system - cause that's all digital is.

So I don't get it, what part of that are you peeps not understanding here?
Seriously, what part?

Analogue is the daddy, it's Digital's daddy too!
Digital is an offspring of daddy, and daddy is analogue!

Analogue is the daddy!