Do you think analog tech has reached its peak and digital media will just inevitably be better or are we just not...

Do you think analog tech has reached its peak and digital media will just inevitably be better or are we just not looking hard enough into analog

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theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/feb/16/the-resume-is-dead-your-next-click-might-determine-your-next-job
sound.whsites.net/index2.html
youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM
xiph.org/video/
youtube.com/watch?v=FG9jemV1T7I&t=463s
xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
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Analog peaked 30 years ago, retard.

how did you get the bottom waveform from a digital output?
nonsense

>analog
beautiful, smooth curve
>digital
disgusting jaggy shit

that's why vinyl will always be superior

2/10 effort

ok so we just figured out
that theres a whole negative periodic table analog tech might just need more intuition

digital is analog's bitch
without analog, digital can't exist
all transmission is analog
your brain is analog
digital is just a subset of analog

prove me wrong

thats why filming in imax cameras looks better than recording in digital

You are a subset of retard

or why all music is recorded in analog converted to digital and compressed

your post is a subset of an argument

the upper curve is the DA conversion of the lower one, m8
it's the same thing

...

That's better if you want the smoothest electrical frequency possible but worse if you want discrete, precise data that stays consistent
You should know most analog chips from the 80's have drifted and decalibrated the fuck out of themselves, but a byte back then is still a byte today

Analog is cheap as fuck at this point, but it's not as good as it's going to get. 3000 dollars of audiophile shit you find on ebay for 500 bucks sounds way beyond perfectly tuned instruments is going to be bottlenecked by digital. DSD files that roll in at 0.6GB/song are too expensive to host for people to buy, either digital will need to compress better or analog hard drives will need to be improved

what

elaborate

op here i mostly just dont like compression i think it takes away more than adds when it comes to media

>Analog
Lossless cassette and vinyl
>Digital
Shitty mp3 bit rate

128kbit mp3 is double the audio quality of a fucking cassette

Can someone explain to me how I can understand analogue and digital?

I find them very difficult to understood as concepts when you get detailed.

Especially when it comes to speakers and audio equipment, it just goes over my head.

...

don't even bother asking on Sup Forums, no one has the slightest clue about audio and sprouts nothing but bullshit

Can you recommend a book, please?

>Analog
>lossless
What, did you find a way to stop entropy?

The concept of lossless can only exist in digital data. If you make no assertions about what the data is supposed to be you have no way of separating the entropy from the "data."

If you put Vinyl under a microscope, it's even jaggier than digital.
IRL, good quality digital signals have a higher resolution than Vinyl.

Transistors are analog devices.

The basic understanding I have is that in a set range analog has infinite possible values, but digital has finite values. Literally OPs picture where analog runs in a smooth curve but digital has set increments that it can increase/decrease.

zölzer's digital audio signal processing

There's a point with digital, when you keep adding precision, that when it goes through the DAC, the additional precision will be overshadowed by the noise level. If we're at that point, then analog has no real purpose anymore. The main benefit of digital is that you can easily transmit and copy it without any added noise. That's a very significant benefit.

I still haven't found digital guitar distortion that actually sounds as good as a pedal though. I suspect that's more due to the difficulty in modelling the intricacies of analog circuits, though.

Thanks a lot, I'll get it.

Analog is limited (theoretically) to the resolution of the recording media. On vinyl, that's the average size of the smallest chips that you can carve off the track. On tape, that's the average size of the grain structure of the magnetic substrate.
At some point, it becomes better to use a high resolution digital stream, rather than an analogue one, because you're not limited by the physical properties of the recording media, you're limited by how fast and accurately you can push data through the recording hardware. With today's technology, digital is the clear winner here.

kys analogturds

digital is where values are discrete and quantized; analog is where they're continuous. In digital, the values exist within a bounded set of integers. In analog, the values exist within the domain of real numbers.

This doesn't mean that analog is more precise than digital, however. An analog recording device always has a maximum resolution. The only resolution calculation I actually know is a the rayleigh criterion. There's something similar for audio, etc.

Do not listen to music if it goes trough any kind of electronics.
Even the simplest amplifiers and microphones and speakers rob it of energy.

Only live.

>rob it of energy
poor quality bait. Any form or recording robs it of resolution.

define resolution

>Even the simplest amplifiers and microphones and speakers rob it of energy.
thats only if you dont clean the electrons user
jesus how new are you???

yeah but Analog is more authentic regardless

>live music
>sound waves travelling through air losing literally 6dB of their energy with each doubling of the distance
disgusting
you need headphones to avoid that

>theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/feb/16/the-resume-is-dead-your-next-click-might-determine-your-next-job

Playing digital through analog amp... old busted hotness.

Conceptually it's pretty simple: say you have a pipe through which water is flowing. You can have only a little bit of water flowing or you can have a lot of water flowing. For simplicity's sake, let's say that the water flows at a set speed and how much of the pipe is getting filled up by water determines the rate of flow. A measure of how much water is flowing through the pipe would be an analog signal. For example, you could play a certain sound a certain volume depending on how much water is flowing through the pipe and the volume changes as the water flow changes.

So then what's a digital signal? Well a digital signal is actually an abstract concept. It's not like you can send actual numbers through a water pipe. Instead what you do is you only send certain amounts of water through the pipe. For example a full flow representing 1 and an empty flow representing 0. Now physics is muddy and electronic circuits are far from perfect (much less water pipes), so you never get a perfect signal, but if you know that they are only sending either full flows or empty flows then if you see a flow that's greater than half-flow then it was probably a 1 that was being sent. Of course the whole process of determining data integrity is a ton more complicated than that, but that's the idea. Because you know the format of how the information was supposed to look like, you're able to preserve that information with complete accuracy (in theory, anyway).

Now obviously analog information is making far more efficient use of the bandwidth (whereas digital data only sees "1" or "0", analog sees everything in between), but because of that it has no way to weed out all the imperfections that applied physics brings.

The smallest interval measurable by an instrument, such as the human ear or eye.

Listening to a girl that is singing and playing an instrument near you and listening to a recording of a girl singing and playing an instrument is just like fucking and watching porn.

Only on shitty equipment, with the cheapest tape you can find. Cassettes can be quite good with a decent deck with dolby noise reduction and metal tape

>stay as close to the stage as possible
>go deaf

such is life!

>posting links to a cancerous news outlet
post an archive, if you're not a shill

>he doesnt clean the electrons in his speaker
97.9999% pure electrons is literally just the same as IRL

For a few generations. And maybe for a little while you can manage distribution of the audio to consumers without going beyond a half dozen generations. But it's such a costly and pointless battle against time to actually try and actually work that way.

You faggots never went to a small concert, with no electronics involved?

no, it's hard to find places to go that don't use electric lighting

makes no difference, sound still has to travel through the air medium

>Can someone explain to me how I can understand analogue and digital?

You have to obtain a mathematical understanding. Pic related. Analog is a continuous system as described in the book. Digital systems are a subset of discrete systems as described in the book. Add a finite set of sample values to a discrete system and you have today's digital.

>Especially when it comes to speakers and audio equipment, it just goes over my head.

Again you have to obtain a mathematical understanding. Get the books that are used in a universities electrical engineering circuits and electronics class.

Speakers are more physics than circuits and electronics. Unless you're designing you're better off thinking of them as black boxes and using a nonlinear time invariant system framework from the signals and systems book to model their behavior.

sound.whsites.net/index2.html
is a good site. Some of his shit is too qualitative when I feel a more quantitative approach is called for, but that's good when your understanding is at the point where quantitative would be over your head. I read his stuff in high school back in the early 2000's and he seems to be getting more in to the math as he makes new pages.

>Do you think analog tech has reached its peak
No analog tech continues to progress. Packing hundreds of millions of transistors in to a square centimeter of silicon while switching from on to off billions of times a second and having it not melt is an analog achievement.

>and digital media will just inevitably be better
This was settled when CDs became affordable enough for consumers to use. Once you could put an hour of uncompressed 16bit stereo on a piece of foil for pennies and it could be played on affordable equipment it was over with.

>I still haven't found digital guitar distortion that actually sounds as good as a pedal though. I suspect that's more due to the difficulty in modelling the intricacies of analog circuits, though.

It's not difficult theres just no money in trying. Distortions aren't really intricate. You could come up with a digital version of an analog effect that would pass a double blind test and all you would have is a more complicated version of the distortion that musicians wouldn't buy because eww digital.

speakers is just magnets, bruh

It actually peaked in the 90's with Hi-Vision/MUSE and Dolby S and SR

Yeah, cassettes could deliver quality close to CD's on TOTL Nakamichi decks and Dolby S equipment
For 1000+ dollar decks and cassettes costing about 80 each piece

Speakers are nonlinear time variant electromechanical systems that try to approximate a linear time invariant transducer over the several octave wide spectrum of audible frequencies. How the fuck do they work?

It peaked when the Studer A827 was first manufactured.

you mean the 820 since stereo master tape is an order or magnitude better than 24 track tape, no matter the machine

I've seen 827s converted to a 2 track.

or it may have been an 820, but it was a 2 track 1 inch machine. sounded incredible.

yeah that's as good as reel to reel gets

With shit like that you could get better than CDs, I was only trying to get better than 128k MP3s which wouldn't be hard on anything that isn't bottom of the barrel trash from radioshack

in terms of noise level even shitty mp3 is way better than everything but the highest end tape equipment

Widlar was a fucking genius. Also a drunk. And an asshole. Basically, for audio which needs so little bandwidth, just have a decent antialiasing filter before it goes to digital. Then you can do wizardry by oversampling and dithering, etc. plus if you don't care about power, digital filters are infinitely better than analogue.

And Oppenheim.

ENOB is determined by SINAD which is due to limitations in capturing the analogue signal, I.e. clock and aperture jitter, hysteresis of the sampling capacitor and mismatch in comparator elements. So yes, digital is only as good as the analogue front end. At least for Nyquist rate converters, I haven't read up on sigma deltas.

as long as AC power is a thing, we will need analog tech

Are you an EE? We used that book for our signals classes. Great stuff.

youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM

Nebraska fag reporting in, we used it for our Signals and systems class.

>Distortions aren't really intricate
In terms of circuit design, distortion is very simple, but human ears are very good at spotting a fake model for whatever reason. If it were actually simple, someone should have implemented it by now.

>people still have no idea what analog and digital even mean

Jesus Christ they're both relevant for their own respective reasons. Digital is, true to name, a method of storing and transferring data and controlling electronic logic circuits.

Analog is anything that reacts to electricity based on its own relevant properties like capacitance, inductance, and resistance. Resistors, capacitors, and inductors are all analog and we can't build digital systems without them. Hell even transistors themselves are analog. It's only when placed in sophisticated logic circuits does digital become anything more than "enough voltage to saturate the gate of an FET."

Yeah I used that book in an EE class.
Louisiana fag here.

>If it were actually simple, someone should have implemented it by now.
If it were simpler to do in digital someone would have done it by now. Your guitar distortion pedal is usually just a couple transistors configured in a way that someone trial and erroring with a bread board decided sounded neat. Why would you go through the trouble of replacing that with a ADC,DAC, and DSP when no matter how close it is to the original it gets the market is going to go eww digital.

Every once in a while I'm tempted to do a guitar distortion or a vacuum tube amp simulator as a LADSPA plugin then I realize I wouldn't use it and neither would anyone else.

>Your guitar distortion pedal is usually just a couple transistors configured in a way that someone trial and erroring with a bread board decided sounded neat
distortion is done with a clipping diode. There's plenty of software that can model an impulse response. No one's actually made an impulse response that actually sounds like a real diode disortion, from what I've heard.

This is why the smart rock musicians buy tinier tube amplifiers and just microphone it and send it through a digital amplifier.

Just microphone a tiny tube amp.

>send it through a digital amplifier
no amplifier is actually digital.

digital is already superior to analog

The neat thing about using impulse response is you can model any linear time invariant system by letting the output be the convolution of the input with the impulse response.

The thing about guitar distortion is it's not linear. When I get that idea about the ladspa plugin the first thing I want to try is to create a memoryless function that maps input to output. You might have to include a memory to get good enough results but at least you'd have a framework to build on that was capable of doing the things you're interested like harmonic and intermod distortion.

...

Spoilers

Reality is digital

MP3 technically has infinite SNR so it's kind of dumb to compare it that way
You can't get higher SNR than a CD on a cassette, and a CD has no wow&flutter

time is continuous, like an analog signal

so are fields, real numbers

1. Superior sound quality
2. Collectable
3. Exists in the corporeal realm
4. Can be sold
5. Make great frisbees
6. Pleasant psychological effect of owning plastic discs
7. Reproduces the actual recorded wave rather than an interpretation of it
8. Better dynamic range
9. Wider frequency response
10. Perfectly reproduces the pops and clicks CD and digital can't capture
11. Muh warmth
12. Isn't sterile and doesn't smell of disinfectant like digital does
13. Did I mention superior sound quality?
14. Infinite sound resolution
15. Digital = Literally Hitler
16. It's literally the only way to listen to music if you're serious about music and not just a poseur
17. Enjoy listening to digital on your $1 store headphones (or maybe your $20 skullcandies if you're *really* extravagant) and your phone
18. Objectively superior sound quality

If you want to learn the truth about digital audio, watch these videos:

xiph.org/video/

>time is continuous
Nope.

>so are fields
Quantum Field Theory. Do you know what quantum means?

>Infinite sound resolution

And then there's this idiot.

Xiph Monty has your audio redpills
youtube.com/watch?v=FG9jemV1T7I&t=463s

this

to equate quantum theory to "reality is digital" belies your own gross misunderstanding of it.

Digital media are the easiest to replicate.
With analog(ue) media you'll have to deal with various inconsistencies, leading to imprecise copies.
Simple as that.

Brain is digital, you should pay more attention in you biology class kid.
Gene expression is also digital. The only analog thingin biological systems is data collection and sorting, and it gets digitized at the very first steps of signal integration

It's a representation of digital data reconstructed to analog before bandwidth filtering

ok
xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml

Your digital line has two samples at different values at the same time.
Clearly you don't understand shit about any of this.

I'll also say that since the standard sample rate in lossless digital recordings is more than double the frequency of the highest pitched noise a human can hear a digital recording misses nothing you would hear in an analog one.

>digital shown as an intermediate DA-conversion stage instead of a lollipop, point sample graph

Learn about signal processing before you comment.

>buy vinyl
>record it digitally the very first time you play it
>use the digital copy and enjoy the not-yet-degraded, first-time-played sound every time

or just buy the CD and enjoy vastly superior quality.