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for those of you who swear by the "analog sound" etc. have you ever done a DBT vs. computer synthesis to verify that the difference even exists? i bet it's placebo effect a lot of the time. |
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after using hardware for a few years, some noises in my old VST tracks really bug me. other noises are still OK. i guess the bottom line is that VSTs don't have to sound bad, but they will if you aren't careful. |
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Because of modern computing power vsts are now more precise than analog instruments and, in a sense, more analog. |
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is this your opinion as an expert coder of 20-line python scripts? |
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oooh,handbags |
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its not a remarkable skill to be able to tell the difference, and if you can't it doesnt matter ( i can't either )... like some people are into wine and know where it comes from & all that by tasting it |
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as for 'swearing by it' that's like turning ur nose up at the table wine METAPHORS,ACE |
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though i just did compare digital shit to cheap shit i suppose,which i didn't mean to, but is true now...ish |
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Vsts are realer than analog because they are more precise waveforms |
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i think most wine snobs are full of shit as well. plenty of studies around to prove it. same with audiophiles which i would imagine extends to tone snobs as well. i could see people preferring analog as it's a more limited medium though. all art comes through limitations after all. |
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what makes a sounds aesthetically pleasant is entirely independent of analog vs. digital or hardware vs. vst..... i don't see magical purity in analog like some do, but you have to try genuinely hard to get a bad noise out of the sh101, whereas it's easy to get crappy thin synth cheese out of any computer. it's why a lot of stupid people blather on about analog as for wine: i can tell the difference between $7 and $25 wine and $50 wine, but beyond that it smacks of people arguing about the different D/A converters on yamaha's various FM synths. it's the same with mp3: 96kbit mp3 is obviously shit, 192 is a much tougher call, 320/FLAC is overkill for almost everything... but if you have the disk space, why the fuck not? |
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What EpicMegatrax said. Getting a "good sound" with Analogue is considerably easier and dare I say it, less skillful, than with a computer. I have done lots of Blind Testing (DBTs via the internet are a bit overkill) and generally can tell correctly about 60% of the time (you'd get 50% of the time by chance). If I struggle to hear the difference, the majority of people who hear the music will never know the difference. Yes, I don't doubt there are engineers/producers out there who can identify it with a better hit rate, but they're <0.1% of the end 'consumers'. I ultimately make music to entertain me. If I can't tell the difference and I like it, mission successful. |
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My portable music player etches grooves onto vinyl in real-time from my iPod and then outputs needle audio through vacuum tube amps made by a blind man in the mountains of Denmark. So all my walking music is so lush and analogy and yummy and poppy and cracky and heroiny. |
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i dunno, i think the dazzle of high-quality gear combines with ignorance and you get lots of nonsense. tubes can sound real nice. not all tubes sound nice. and there are things that sound nicer than tubes (like, for example, the sound of a black lab dog running full tilt on tarmac. i love that sound). |
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You all are missing the point. VST technology uses newer engineering practices that weren't yet developed when analog synthesizers were being designed. The new technology allows for better waveforms, crisper highs and thundering lows. |
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yeah i hear with digital you can get bass that's sub-DC even |
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I heard about this guy who made a face when discussing digital versus analog and someone hit him in the head and his face stayed like that forever. :-((( |
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I love the Kids in the Hall |
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Ha, this old chestnut again. As an electronic engineer I could bore you to death from a thousand yards with the technical stuff, so I will try to keep it brief. Every single analogue component will generate some kind of distortion, will vary with temperature and age, and will pick up interference to some degree. All of these factors mean that the electron flow is never ever the same. Whether most of these effects are audible is another matter, but they are certainly occurring! Digital on the other hand is largely immune to these so the sound will tend not to accumulate these analogue "imperfections" as long as it is in the digital domain. Some digital systems attempt to model the first order (i.e. simplest and most obvious) analogue imperfections mathematically which can sometimes sound remarkably good. As you can imagine, the better the digital model then the "better" it sounds. A simple model I have just imagined is a sawtooth waveform below: Starting value of x equals 255. Start loop: if x equals 0 then set x to 255. otherwise subtract 1 from x. wait for some amount of time. Go to start of loop. This gives an 8-bit sawtooth. Feed the x value to a DAC and hey presto you are a synth designer! The frequency is altered by waiting for more or less time. To model a slightly wonky analogue oscillator just use a random number generator to alter the subtraction or wait time (or both). e.g. sometimes subtract 2 or 0, or wait slightly longer/ shorter time. This adds dynamic movement to an otherwise static waveform. Really I think the debate needs to be reclassified as dynamic v static sound. |
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vstalogs have crispier lows and more bassy high end than analog |
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See the hawk knows what I'm talking about. Analog circuits simply don't have the bandwidth to put out harmonics like those generated by today's Vsts. Analog may be fun to "tweak" but only two parameters can bw modified at a time. I've found that boosts at around 65 and 6500 hertz help analog sound more like a good vst. |
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More than two parameters can be modified you simple toe rag. It's not limited to the number of limbs you have you smelly rat bag. |
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computers have an undeserved rep as being sterile. while digital treats that "distortion" as error and filters most of it out, things get perfectly complex again after that. let's try this: Every single windows registry entry will generate some kind of lag, will vary with time of day and age, and will pick up interference to some degree. All of these factors mean that the program flow is never ever the same. Whether most of these effects are audible is another matter, but they are certainly occurring! this is before you even wander over to an old computer like the apple II, which feels.... i dunno, alive. you switch it on after a week and there's gunk in the chips that give you a brief flash of whatever you were last working on before it clears the screen. it messes up sometimes, often pleasantly. i guess that doesn't have much to do with how VST oscillators sound, though. just mean to say there's plenty of chaos in there if you look closely. how about them D/A converters? |
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That's a nice idea but really the chaos for an audio process is highly deterministic and audio buffers see to the elimination of most of any sort of dynamics anyway. The main causes of "distortion" you get in a digital system (e.g. a PC with a soundcard) are: DAC clock jitter, DAC non-linearity, PSU related issues (ripple, poor decoupling of RF intermodulating down, etc). I guess you could get cosmic rays flipping bits in RAM but I don't think that will have an audible effect! As always its mostly the "a" in DAC that is causing the fun to occur and that is of course Analogue. However from the DAC there will likely be amplification and some form of transducer such as a loudspeaker. These will both be non-linear, as will your listening environment, as is your ear. There is absolutely loads of psycho-acoustic stuff at work of which I have little understanding but this has a big affect. The audio goal people are after is in the middle of the A/D spectrum. Analogue electronics starts from "OMG this is too wild to want to listen to" and is tamed. Digital electronics starts from "OMG this is too static to want to listen to" and is funked up. In a pure form neither analogue nor digital are particularly close to the middle ground of "this sounds wicked". I think that hybrid synthesis schemes are actually fantastic and do offer the best of both worlds. Have a listen to the SQ80: This has digital VCOs and analogue filters but sounds absolutely fantastic. However great analogue VCOs are, they are so limited in waveforms it is laughable sometimes. How many analogue synths just offer saw and square? With a sample based DCO I can have any arbitrary waveform I damn well choose! Back to the original question, I think people can be fooled providing the digital sounds has been sufficiently "funked up"! |
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all you have to do is replace a few transistors with vacuum tubes and you've got the problem solved. |
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Vacuum tubes go full circle and actually sound digital. That's why the earliest computers used vacuum tubes, in 18th century horsehair loom facotries. |
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i have a SCI Prophet VS and it sounds wonderful. sample-based DCOs with analog filters, chorus, multiplexers etc.... if you create a suitably complex piece of code and then bung the variables through a randomizer (the Prophet VS has a random patch generator!) things don't feel very deterministic anymore. instant "OMG this is too wild to want to listen to." tie some more variables to a random little window of RAM or swapfile, and you'll lose all hope of making things repeatable very fast. i'm not arguing that glitching DACs sound interesting, just the notion that computers are this clinical stale universe where everything always unfolds in exactly the same way. |
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*i just disagree with the notion |
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