That’s not entirely true though. It’s unbelievably easier to generate a square wave than a sine wave in a digital system.
Also, these overtones you’re talking about are a bit of a slippery slope to include in an argument. Technically speaking, a digital system that outputs 0V and then switches to 1V for an insanely long time also outputs “millions and millions and millions” of overtones.
Not to say it’s all completely invalid, though. Especially with the analog-digital debate, intuitive and technical things often branch out into each other.
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Incredible, i would lie if i tell you that i can hear a difference.
Will analog synths be replaced in near future by digital ones, if the digital sound engines are capable of recreating analog sounds in such a perfect way?
“These overtones you’re talking about” Over tones are the fundamental structure of Timbre. No idea how this relates to the slippery slope fallacy. I’m pretty sure you’re using that term incorrectly, unless you can explain what you mean.
It seems to me you are missing a fundamental understanding of what timbre is and the mathematics behind it.
There’s no digital synth that can process millions of overtones in real time. Generally VA synths will approximate with a few dozen overtones. Some of the more advanced ones might use a couple hundred. Maybe there’s a soft synth out there that uses 100? An overtone is essentially another waveform, with less energy than the fundamental. So what you’re saying is that your digital synth can produce millions of different wave forms of slightly different structure, at descending amplitude. Are you SURE you know what you’re talking about?
I also have no idea what you mean by a computer going from 0v to 1v. Are you talking about a digital bit going from 0 to 1?
so much cringe.
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Just listened to the comparison (with eyes closed), to my ears I hear a difference in the bottom end/lower mids, with the Prophet-5 sounding a bit fuller and rounder. Could also be psychoacoustics and certainly the demo is impressive, but the Prophet-5 does sound better to me.
Like someone else said here, if you don’t hear the difference don’t bother with the analog thing and also, if the focus is on a sound in the mix rather than the instrument as such, the differences will probably fade completely by the time the sound is fitted into the mix.
What I struggle to understand is why there seems to be so much annoyance with people who advocate analog instruments over digital ones. An instrument must be heard and felt by the musician, different guitars sound different to different people - and often the differences are nuanced yet exactly those nuances make the difference between eg a $300 and a $3000 acoustic guitar. That’s not to say that more expensive = better sounding (I have a chinese made classical guitar that I paid $500 for that sounds like 10x its price tag), just want to point out that the nuances do matter and are personal, especially if the instrument is to be PLAYED and the musician can hear/feel a difference.
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Seriously. Yeah there’s a difference and if it’s important to you and you can manage it god bless but it has squat to do with making music. Theres been amazing music made with both.
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the grievance is not with someone preferring analog over digital or vice versa (and seriously, why would I give a sh*t - much like sexual preference, that is your business and does not affect me AT ALL).
the grievances are more often than not (at least from my experience) with the unnecessary snobbery and more importantly, the HEAPS of misinformation that some people use to justify their decision (*).
it is just annoying beyond belief to hear/read someone trying to be superior to somebody else by belittling the “opposing” choice… all the while talking completey nonsense and spreading false info at the same time.
(*): especially when there should be absolutely ZERO need or occasion for anyone to make a choice.
(last time I checked, which was this morning, analog devices did not explode when connected to digital equipment)
or, in less words:
+1 to what @Technomancer said.
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There’s no digital synth that can process millions of overtones in real time.
But digital oscillators don’t necessarily generate their waves that way.
To output a straightforward squarewave from the pin of some Atmega chip or whatever, you set an internal clock and then you get an output pin to switch it’s state in the register according to the clock. Read the output of this pin and you get your nice squarewave. That’s it. All the overtones are “included” in this signal, without having to manually calculate each overtone in the code. If you perfectly capture one full cycle of this signal and take the fourier transformation, you’d get your typical fundamental frequency with the corresponding odd-numbered harmonics.
Mathematically, a square wave has many definitions, a very useful one is this. You get the fundamental frequency and all the odd numbered overtones with decreasing amplitude. In my funny example we get a microcontroller that outputs the squarewave as described above. Now let’s say we let the microcontroller switch the state only once within an hour. The fundamental frequency would be 1/(60 * 60) = 0.000277… Hz. The next overtone would be 3/(60 * 60) = 0.000833… Hz, the next would be 5/(60 * 60) = 0.001388… Hz and so on to infinity. Alright, so we got our 1-hour squarewave with all of our overtones. There’s always a “step” of 2/(60 * 60) Hz between the overtones.
How many overtones can we technically hear as humans with our 20-20k Hz bandwidth? We’d have (20000 * 60 * 60)/2 - (20 * 60 * 60)/2 = 35964000 overtones covering human perception. That’s a lot of overtones and all we had to do is switch a register of a chip once an hour. Not much processing power needed. None of these overtones is specified in the code or elsewhere.
But the overtones are still “there”, because it’s just another way of mathematically describing a defined signal in the time-domain. Does it make sense to describe this 1-hour squarewave via overtones?
So it’s weird. Is this 1-hour square wave even to be considered a sound? Intuitively not, but technically speaking all the principles of overtones still apply, why wouldn’t they.
Sure there are additive synths that individually process overtones, but there certainly are also synths that don’t. I’m just trying to illustrate the point that this whole argumentative thing about the frequency-domain can get out of hand pretty quick.
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Does it matter? Analog synth will go through digital interface and will be listened to digitally by listener (Spotify, YouTube, etc).
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Computer registers store bit values at either approximately 0 volts DC or approximately 5 volts DC.
A sound can have harmonics and overtones that cannot be detected by the human ear simply because they are outside the frequency range of human hearing, plus many harmonics are at significantly lower volumes.
Hence there will be finite point where the extra harmonics/overtones have no value (unless you are a dog). This explains why a low note on a piano sounds harmonically richer than a high note on a piano (the harmonics of the higher note are inaudible).
If you consider that an harmonic is an integer multiple of the fundamental frequency then we are not talking about millions of audible overtones per timbre.
I prefer Apple/Mac OS…
Oh whoops, wrong conundrum… 
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Linux is the true analogue OS 
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Clearly the winner here is low-bitrate oranges
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Mmmmm sooo warm.
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To be fair I think OP asked a legitamate question from their perspective… I don’t think many have tried to answer it directly, we just jumped back into the bottomless void that OP probably wasn’t aware of… (My comment was a joke about the void, but I still think there’s some clarity that could come to OP, but not from me right now) 
No need for analog these days.
Modern analog modelling actually sounds better than a lot of these new analog synths, and particularly DCO based
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“analog sound” to me is the whole chain that gets you this kind of vintage vibe. Pipe everything through analog mixer with nice sounding preamp overdrive, eq, compression, print to tape and you are in the magic land. Plugs work good in many cases but eq, distortion, tape emulation are sounding way off to my ears.
how is DCO “analog modelling” ?
Not sure if I´m misunderstanding you, or if you are mixing things up.
A DCO is an analog oscillator that is digitally controlled in terms of frequency and reset.
all sound creation is still analog i.e. not subject to any framerate/bitdepth shenanigans.
They’re saying that modern analog modeling sounds better than DCOs.