Analog vs Digital

The way different sounds interact in analog mixers is different from digital, I think (feel)

haha an analog vs digital thread!?! what is it, 2003? :rofl:

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Love this

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This is a really weird take from Mr.Natale there as ears are not analog at all, they are biological. The clue is in the word analogue.

Nobody tell this man what the majority of analog circuitry is built with!

Debating analog and digital is still one of those topics where one side has a complex about their chosen form of signal generation and the other one doesn’t.

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For anyone who needs converting to a hybrid routine please watch this video. Its not relevant anymore. Even the originators say so.

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I linked an interview some time ago by Richard James Burgess (apparently he coined ā€œEDMā€). I really like the way he says ā€œperceived difference in sound qualityā€.

ā€œI have the soft synth discussion often. I still have a comprehensive rack of hard synths, but I prefer to use soft synths mostly because staying in-the-box enables me to work on planes and pick up where I left off months and years later. That is more valuable to me than a perceived difference in sound quality. And two synths of the same model very often sound different anyway, depending on vintage and condition.ā€

…tiredsome…

get a heat aaaand whatever u got in use, even the cheapest thin plastic thingy, starts to sound like a truu full fledged analog device…

Is an analog osc/filter, completely digital controlled synth analog or digital?
Most synths are hybrid anyway, except the cheaped out Behringer stuff where they don’t want to spend monies on digital that much :laughing:

Endgame

I enjoy plugging digital synths into the external audio input of analog synths where that signal is processed through an analog filter with modulated filter and amp envelopes and any analog fxs that analog synth may have such a the Moog Matriarch’s stereo delay.

I also run different analog synths through the
same inputs. For example, a Roland GR300 into the Moogs external audio input.

Comparing the analog Roland GR300 guitar synth to the Boss SY1000 guitar synth and modeler its GR300 digital model is around a 98% accurate representation of the analog version, the difference being a better perceived sound quality of the analog.

When comparing an analog Korg Arp 2600m to a sample, both sound similar in perceived warmth, with the sample sounding static because it’s just a digital capture of a moment in time of the analog waveform.

I think if we don’t want analog or digital being better than the other, then I think it is an interesting topic though

A lot of how we perceive things is a matter of what we were raised on, what we are used too. Vinyl vs MP3 sound quality for example.

I spoke with a musician from Chicago many years ago who was playing an outdoor party as his band was passing through my rural area. The night was beautifully dark with a brilliant display of the Milky Way, our Galaxy on full display.

He said he missed the red glow of sodium vapor lights.

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To play devil’s advocate: no other instrument’s tones sound like synths.

A piano sounds like a piano, a guitar a guitar, etc, so we’re looking at different qualities within a comparatively strictly delimited range. You don’t need to talk about the overall tone when comparing pianos, just specifics.

Whereas ā€˜a synth’ can sound like a 303, an MS-20, a DX100, a VST or any number of patches made within them. Which ā€˜traditional’ tone descriptors would easily allow us to talk about how a Vangelis pad sounds compared to a trance stab?

I’m not arguing that ā€˜organic’ is terribly useful, but I do think it’s an obvious and loosely-meaningful term that’s arisen in contrast to new synthesised sounds we simply couldn’t produce until a few decades ago, and which strike us as lacking (or rejecting!) some ā€˜indefinable’ quality. We don’t have words for that quality because we’ve never had to define it before, because it had been present in every sound we’d ever previously heard.

In this context it seems natural and appropriate that we find older terms aren’t quite enough, and that there will be sloppiness as descriptive terminology evolves.

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