Digital VS Analog with Ruben Tilgner, Elysia | Superbooth 2024

[@PATRIK67KALLBACK]

This is so interresting discussion between digital and analogue. It's neither one of them, it's both in complement with each other.

[@darryldouglas6004]

Exactly what I was about to post. I have both and they work well together not vs each other.

[@nerrrh]

Love your energy, Anthony. The way you engage with others is deeply empathetic yet authentic to your own knowledge, great for communicating these ideas to the rest of us!

[@indietonne]

I learned so much in the last 30 Mins. Thank you. I was always thinking I am crazy that my Analog sounds so much better than my VST but now I really understand a lot of how it works. Thank you Anthony and Reuben.

[@afrikankingzent]

Great discussion about re-creating transients in the digital domain. Sheds a lot of light on why analog sounds so good

[@BeardLAD]

Understanding the sonic benefits of quantum mechanics, and how those benefits (quantum properties) can be lost via improper digital processing in the signal chain, is key in designing your sound production… …using Class A analogue circuitry, at the right juncture in sound production, is a great way to either preserve the quantum properties gained, or mitigate the quantum properties lost via digital processing in the studio. 5:08 - ‘quality’

[@TimesOfTheSines.official]

I agree with that, even without properly understanding the science side of the equation... I keep, & still use certain class A outboard that has grown to a healthy collection of things still in a rack. Just got a Soundcraft SI Expression 2 console running recently too... Cause it was very cheap & comparable in cost 4 me to the price of good audio interfaces. This Soundcraft had the appeal of being more than just a high quality i/o A/D interface for the studio... It also is a hi quality digital mixer & can give me 28 analogue ins + 16 xlr analogue direct outs... Perfect now for doing what u advise here, & choosing the right stages for tracking things thru some preferably class A outboard processors... There are now enough semi-pro quality outboard at very affordable 2nd hand prices too, the last 20yrs has made the list for more of that mid range of cheaper but also better, or nearly pro end worthy units, wider for choices than it was before pre '00's era. But I've realised u can get to the stages with only using plugs, that u can start to be messing with to many choices & chaining multiple plugs to balance & juggle, trying to bring up better results the slower & harder way 4 staying so in the box? & simply having some outboard to try by then instead to process thru is what works 9/10 times

[@Bleeeaaoop]

Anthony you call them instruments because you're an awesome artist that understands music thoroughly. You connect with your synthesizers (and don't forget the pedals) on another level you're awesome dude thanks for another video. ✌️🎶

[@nagchumpalot]

Thank you Anthony your discussions with the makers at SuperBooth have been fascinating..! I spoke a bit to Ruben also at Superbooth and he was such a good guy He gave me a great explanation and demo of the Xpressor NEO I played with it for a while and I will definitely be getting one it sounded so good way beyond the cost of it Elysia stuff is superb. Also very thankful for the fridge Magnet he gave me made from the Real Elysia knobs! Ha ha great merch!😂

[@JT-qc2nb]

In some analog synths, you can hear the transient larger or a little more inconsistent than a digital synth. I've always said a lot of the analog vibe comes from the transient. Sometimes I'll use transient shapers or expanders on my soft synths to make them feel a bit more analog-y -- if they call for it.

[@sqwook]

I love how deep your analog digital question turned out to be, this is an excellent series. Each video has taught me so much. I like how you can liken audio resolution to image resolution, digital can only replicate so much of the "sound image"

[@SomebodyPickaName]

That was a really interesting conversation! I got a lot out of that one. Thanks, Anthony!

[@johanwk]

Perfect interview, I'm looking forward to the follow-up!

[@ap7498]

Thanks so much for these interviews and interactions over there! They are so interesting 🙏

[@darryldouglas6004]

This reminds me of the old debate of Ginger vs. Maryanne. Both! Is the only answer! 😃

[@bcj842]

Maryannalogue!

[@eti313]

Diginger!

[@MorbidManoeuvres]

I take from this talk that Analog is pure, and seems way to complex for a digital path to really capture pure analog or improve in any way. But it’s different tools for different things I’m always gonna love an Esq1 the same as I love a minimoog digital / analog bring different flavours and that’s what I love about this synth world

[@MosEisleySpacePort1138]

I love the comment about digital being limited when it tries to emulate analog. The same could be said for analog when it was first introduced; so many presets were created back then to emulate acoustic instruments. For the most part, they’re not great emulations. However, when analog is used as its own instrument, it’s limitless.

[@russ254]

great point! those “clarinet” and “oboe” model d and arp patches were frankly pathetic, judged against acoustic instruments

[@MosEisleySpacePort1138]

@@russ254 My first synth was a Roland HS-60 that I got as a teenager. Still have it. I relied on those presets for years. Once I let go of that and learned what all the sliders actually do, it opened up a sonic world. And when I started listening to it through real studio monitors and not the built-in speakers, I learned that this is a special instrument.

[@AussieDubber]

Well that escalated quickly! Great conversation, read my mind

[@jorgentraun]

That's one of the best explanation I head. Thanks a lot Anthony for sharing this in my opinion very important topic. There's a reason why I use a lot of hardware instruments, hardware post processing, record an edit with digital plug-ins in my Daw at 96KHz. This interview explains it so well

[@74goldenjet]

Very interesting! This confirms my feeling regarding plugins and digital synths, it's like wav vs mp3. It's also interesting that there is a group of people who clearly hear and feel that something is amiss in digital sound, and another group who can't hear it, or don't care. To me, it's like when someone says stones are grey and water is blue.

[@Yekvan]

Thanks you for sharing this

[@rosalindwebb7729]

Just love the new inventions of these beautiful instruments best wishes.❤

[@arseniyistomin1894]

I think I've just come up with a kind of explanation of effects discussed in the video. When two waves interact nonlineary, they usually create so-called sidebands with frequencies equal to sum and difference of initial ones. That's why we can get non-audible frequencies out of audible and at the same time sidebands of this non-audibal frequencies can appear in audio range. For istance, two waves with frequencies 22 kHz and 23 kHz can create a 1 kHz wave

[@setaihedron]

I appreciate this gentleman's point of view and no doubt some aspects of what he has said have some relevance but for the most part it's not an issue. The issues he's talking about with emulation of digital processing have a number of usable workarounds and solutions that render equivalent sound quality. For example most 64 bit digital synths and fx use much higher sampling rates in their internal processing.

[@LagoLhn]

In a mix it doesn’t really matter that much. I have a full rack of Elysia and it is luxurious. Analog is more about immediacy, feedback and irregularity than it is about a clear edge in sound quality. Recall and speed in digital matter too. Especially if you are working with multiple artists.

[@lordwindsor]

I love digital for its convenience, it's a must. But I fell in love with hardware long ago, there is just something so special with some of these pieces that digital can just never touch. I have to have a chain of hardware as an insert on the 2 bus, otherwise the mix sounds lifeless in comparison. In the end digital/analog is a marriage made in heaven as they are both so complimentary when used properly together.

[@OneMorningSongs]

Thank you again, these interviews are really interesting.

[@davebellamy4867]

It's like we are evolved to hear analogue generated sounds. It's always going to be a challenge to make digital sound the same or "better." Certain parameters yes like noise floor but the character of the sound ismore tricky. The transient discussion was fascinating especially the character of the beginning of the sound. Like we evolved to hear a twig cracking in the forest.

[@Gerald_Daniel]

Some may perhaps find a little frustrating that digital emulations are still not that far as expected. I'm not that affected by this, since my favorite playground is early digital pre-DX sound, which would actually be some further material for discussions, as it's a little noisy but doesn't cut through any less than fully analogue machines. Concretely I mean YAMAHA's GS series.

[@donwrangler]

I used to dislike electric/digital drums for a variety of reasons but now it's all I use!

[@Datacustic]

Best analog processing company in my eyes because of its transparent and open communication, but assembly and QA done in-house. And as an European I don’t need to buy products from overseas or outside EU imports, which makes the price very achievable. Have Xpressor, Filter, and Nvelope - all of them are super fast to use with instant great results but they are also deep enough to grow with them. And these processors don’t lose the slightest detail when putting a signal through it. Highly recommend

[@martijn_nl]

Ruben is such a great guy! I would love to see a discussion between Ruben and Mark Barton. Digital is great when it comes to recording (AD conversion) and limited in producing complex signals. That's what I said before about the difference between recording an analog synth performance vs playing the same performance on a plugin synth. Analog signals are too complex to faithfully generate digitally.

[@lucmermans37]

Mark Barton doesn't know anything lol. Ruben is a pro

[@ChuckSilva]

Fantastic ❤🔥🙏

[@donnydarko7624]

It's like trying to measure a continent's oceanic shoreline it's technically infinite granularity so we cant truly ever hope to get a fully accurate simulation of every possible nuance or possible variable that actually influences the sound that ultimately is what hits our ears. I do think one of things is the air that an amplifier moves that in turn moves the mic diaphragm and how that interaction is like the idea of causality with the butterfly flapping it's wings. How much each molecule of air being pushed needs to be simulated to make a simulation of that to be impossible to discern a simulation from the real thing?

[@russ254]

glad this conversation is happening, but I don’t think it matters. What matters to me is songwriting and musicianship. I’d rather hear good music played on a diddly bo through a transistor radio than generic pop garbage on a Strad violin. That’s why I LOVE digital - so many tools, so cheap! Then comes the hard part - musicianshiplitude

[@markr.devereux3385]

I hoping you cover THE FAIRLIGHT synth/emulator from the 1980s. I know they are rare big hunky machines and if anybody can do it your channel can.

[@KingMJForeverAndEver]

💐💐💐

[@christopherventer6391]

The point about transient response is interesting, but I don't think it's actually kind of 2 different points. For something like an envelope for a filter or vca, digital sample rate should be totally fine as often those only go down to 1ms minimum attack (which is 1khz). The problem comes with reproducing the much much faster transient changes in something like a square or pulse oscillator, because those harmonics are going to become very high frequency very quickly. A true square wave has all the odd harmonics of the fundamental frequency at a level of 1/harmonic number. So, already at 1khz fundamental, you have -9.5 dB at 3khz, and then 5khz, 7khz, 9khz, 11khz, etc. Then you're reaching 20khz at -33dB approximately (1/20). So, that's already close to nyquist and at still an audible component of the signal. If your fundamental is a little higher at say 2khz, then those harmonics are twice as high frequency and you are already passing nyquist at the 10th harmonic, which is -30dB. etc etc. So, very quickly you start to lose ability to represent the square wave without aliasing. The same is true for sawtooth, but they also contain all the even harmonics as well as the odd. So yeah, he's totally.correct about that especially when it comes to modulating those pitches. One place you can hear a lot of aliasing is vibrato effects of higher pitches if not properly handled.

[@triplebeam23]

I think if everyone could own a moog or a prophet they would .. i always said i dont need no analog synthesizer and that it was over rated till i purchased a moog matriarch and then i was like okay i get it now.. and im addicted .. i have a OB6 on the way 😊

[@gillihansmobilewelding]

It's weird how many people make subjects like this so needlessly complicated. VOLTAGE is the difference. Sure, non-linearity plays a roll if you're summing through an analog mixer, but voltage is the key and also why there are different stages of analog goodness. Consumer gear is 9v (Behringer), pro-sumer gear is a little better at 18v (DBX), and the pro gear is best at 24v and higher. Rupert Neve was so clear about this when he constantly explained why he used 48v rails. Pro mastering desks use 120v rails. The higher the voltage, the higher the headroom, and that means depth... done!

[@KitKalvert]

I really appreciated all the info.. Went to check on the site and I see a compressor for 10 grand. How are musicians supposed to be able to access these kinds of units when Spotify are paying nothing peanuts? I mean, what do you want me to say? I went from being enthusiastic and wiling to sacrifice things to just feeling like Im being trolled by these prices. I wont sound as good as rich people but I'm gonna make better music than all of them now I see the perspective .. pay to win

[@elysia-audio]

Hey @KitKalvert, thank you for your comment. At elysia, we believe it is very important that everyone has access to good analog products. In addition to our mastering compressor, we also have the xpressor|neo and our mpressor|500, which are loved by many customers, in our portfolio. These products are more affordable to everyone who wants to get into analog audio equipment without sacrificing on sound quality. Make shure to check them out - you won't be disappointed. Cheers!

[@KitKalvert]

@@elysia-audio I appreciate the reply. I was just speaking my mind and being as honest as I could. Thanks for listening

[@edmc2]

😎

[@bigjayrillah3508]

I was putting the prophet rev 4 against repro 5 and it wasn’t even close.

[@asor8037]

I think he is wrong about the part about not emulating the input stages of analog gear though, most companies do this.

[@Pawel-rv1ek]

If digital sounds good enough to be used by Hans Zimmer in big movies then I think I'm fine with it as well.

[@ITSupport-q1y]

Nice comments, I think that a lot of the bit hit songs, were and will be produced with analog and reduced recourses, Creativity seems better than having an unlimited supply of plugins, Also the skills to use analog needed are higher. Thanks Terence

[@OudartPatricia-Claire]

❤ clear difference between the artist and the technician. Playing is not producing for music industry.. I have some early synths, playing, and can compare to test records on internet, 33rpm, CD, and I have software instrument like Korg polysix and monopoly, wave records, a Roland Jupiter 50, based on samples and numeric, one Behringer Deepmind 12D, wich is Analog and numeric effects that I mostly bypass, for me the pleasure to play music is lot more than technology, and the better pleasure is clearly to enter in the harmonics world, not the technical passiv listening. By past I tuned a real piano strings, good school for harmonics treasure. That's why also analogic is better as playing because this is only an association of instruments, voices, and notes, and your proper touch in that... complex technology is oht of price for me and constantly in evolution meaning you change your material, it is cancel culture, you are lost is wanting what you have not. My old Roland SH 2000 have secret sounds and presets, an amazing after touch, and this is a pleasure to play. I will buy for it an analogic effect, I use actually old digital, Behringer Rack box, it is in the same line, 50 years old technology facing the actual mess changing every six months, pretending being better than the previous. Note I have a clarinet and recorders, and we also must count them analogic, guitars, sounds of Nature, this is more a philosophy than a technical professional technical issue. What's makes me happy is that, actually, we have easy access to rebuilds of early analog instruments, as players. Personally, I don't care about industry, obsessional rythmic of gigantic cities . I live in Nature, far from that. 😂so I'm certainly not representative ❤

[@mickec5245]

Emulations are still like animations

[@markwilliams142]

When I was a kid in the 90s just getting into electric guitar, it was the golden age of “hype.” By the year 2000 people were hyping up stuff like using silver solder (don’t do it! You get colder/weaker solder joints). Luckily my father was an electrical engineer. He taught me a lot about “hype.” The most important thing he taught me was that the human ear uses the phase relationship between high and low frequencies to tell us where a sound is coming from. It’s how we know if someone is talking next to us or behind us. Digital processing will always have a bandwidth. At the high and low ends of that bandwidth, the frequencies essentially get chopped off. This messes with the phase relationship between high and low frequencies. People talk about digital audio sounding more 2-Dimensional. And to an extent, they’re correct. I remember the conversion from vinyl and cassette tape to CDs. I don’t think it’s at all coincidental that as soon as digital became the standard medium for music it was immediately followed by the invention of “surround sound.”

[@zvukofor]

If we have no problem on playback reproducing symphonic orchestra with 48k SR - why it would be a problem for synths? For transients? The math says there's no problem. No problem with "dots" and high freqs - the only solution to equation is the real sawtooth/square, not that we cannot reproduce them up to 1/2 nyqwist - we can and we do, perfectly accurate. The problem with digital synths is that most of them does not use full SR for "CV", for LFOs and EGs - that is the problem. Nonlinear processing? - the only problem is it takes a huge resources to built a good model of analog nonlinear to be precice enough to fool our perception. No other problems. We have a good digital nonlinear, we just have so much more analog stuff no one cares to model. Plus we love to touch things. Digital + analog + physical = the real deal.

[@eti313]

And every sound you hear on KZbin is a digital recording converted to analog.

[@zvotaisvfi8678]

hey whateup dudeo. i'm Saul Pickett. I discovered a thing. so if you get a big rock, and like, some chisels , and like cut every vertex off such that it becomesa "wheel" of sorts.... well. you put the newly shaped rock on top of a synthesizer, and now you have something calleda gramophone or turntable. The fact that the turntable or reel to reel platter has MASS is a very important thing . No matter if you record or repro, the playback speed will be different on any device, analog or digital. BUT. crystal oscillators , such as in cellphones. or recording 24 tracks at once versus 1 track during an overdub... This consumes Slight but "significant relative to clock stability" amount of power the supply can generate. Ever wonder why when you punch in, saya bass overdub on digital.... "you can always tell it was dubbed somehow..." thats because the pitch. the pitch when you were tracking 24 channels live is different in the converter than if you do the overdub, because less power is being consumed during the dub or whatever. if your converters are plugged directly in, you have nothing. every single audio channel, midi channel, whatever, anything connected to the converters has to be transformer isolated period, that is a whole nother discussion. analog tape has its own problems. it always sounds "rectified". it cannot "listen to negative voltages." if you were to run your music through a full wave rectifier... well. that is exactly how tape records audio. the difference is... the TIME aspect, is often not very good but sometimes nearly perfect. verusus digital, the clock on digital is terrible terrible terrible in comparison to tape. as far as ... lengths of time and all this. tape / turntable is 100% reactive. digital is like a vocoder with a couple hundred poles. you can end up with fundamentals and overtones that did not exist during the performance, with digital, as in. the notes and times and tempos and pitches themselves change. of course it will on any recording, but analog , if exactly perfectly setup. i mean agonizingly perfectly setup. can produce more accurate information in terms of When events happened in time, more stable downbeats. just cause a computer has 5 decimal points doesn't mean it is accurate to 5 decimal points, and it might stray by the time you start and end the recording. just saying. people said analog is all about tone, brah, distortion, etc. nah man. analog is about clean, its about downbeat stability.

[@zvotaisvfi8678]

thelonius monk alone in san franscisco. I mean there's a thousand examples from nirvana to anything else. but like CD players too. but the alone in san franscisco digital master or whatever. I dont know why this comes to mind theres tons of examples. but "the downbeat of the recording" gets far enough out that it changes the perception of what he plays. if you listen "into" the recording and reimagine it, you can get more of a sense.... he wasn't doing this wacky 32n'd note thing, he was playing the downbeat, but the recording , mixed with his exact performance and detailed attentive style, gets mixed up. a piano is a stable device. a crystal oscillator isn't.

[@zvotaisvfi8678]

I dont know if its the cutting process or the playback process, but I wonder if big downbeats "drag" the platter during cutting, as far as, they need to inject a little watt of audio signal to the DC drive moter, such that it bumps the platter faster to compensate. seems liek a lot of old records the big downbeats warble the playback.

[@zvotaisvfi8678]

what we need is filmo sound. instead of magnet tape we just use CDR tape. yall can cut me in like 100k on that idea $

[@zvotaisvfi8678]

"digital is better" 2:30.. sorry im watching the video i was just commenting without watching. #1 #1 #1 #1 #1 #1 #1 #1 #1 #1 #1 #1 problem with digital is latency. whomp whomp scrap the whole pile emo.

[@zvotaisvfi8678]

"why is digital designers struggler to create analog" because literally. digital is analog. hello. humans. welcom to earth I am your host Saul the post human archangel super sayin. bros. literally bros. digital is analog. 🤯. bros. literally. yall playing wit ha friggin zoom handheld recorder like "yeah man steely dan was crazy!! who wants a 2" machine when you got this !" you know. problem is all the 2" machines are broken, etc. and like analog is dead. sadness but whatever bro i'm just saying. now everyones like "SMD IS BETTER!" bro. bros bros bros. bros. literally bros. I've heard it all. SMD IS BETTER THAN THRU HOLE !!! THERE"S NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HANDWIRED AND PCB!@!!!!! LITERALLY THERES NO DIFFERENCE!!!! 🥱🤦🤦‍♂🤦‍♀ bro. if all your components and traces are CLOSEr than 1/4", it is different than if all your traces are further away from another by 1/4". when you do your recaps, dont cut the leads off the caps. every capacitor is a MICROPHONE... wow thats a great idea lets make a microphone based off of a capacitor !! anyway. leave the capacitor leads LONG so your caps are STANDING off the board !! dont pull out all your caps and then stick the brand new ones down against the pcb plane.... tricks bro. ovious triks. spend $0 and improve the sound. dont cut your capacitor leads. etc. when you lay out your pcb, make all the components spread out. how many PCB designers have thier logo in 72 point font on a blank quarter of the board, and all the components are crammed together on the other side. you wanto lay out a pcb? get the schematic. draw a circle around every component on the schematic. there's your layout.

[@CarrotSensitive]

digital and analog will never sound like well, analogues of one another for a very simple reason. analog circuit design starts off as pure chaos that you gradually refine into something usable on a signal. digital audio is an empty box where you try and trick linear systems into being chaotic. i don't think the amount of samples in a signal has much of anything to do with why transients are better represented in some cases in analog. interpolation can capture most of what analog does at most sampling rates. that is obviously not the issue.

[@apeirogonmusic]

I can't believe there's a sign that says the Water is not drinkable / potable Who would drink from a fountain hahhahaha

[@andybond5002]

Digital now sounds the same or better. It’s no longer a question or a challenge. you can get a 5000 USD synth in a 100 USD plugin, but now you need a 2000 USD macbook also. The only company that is gaining is Apple.

[@Pawel-rv1ek]

Who is forcing you to use Apple? And you can run many synths on a laptop, so it doesn't make sense.

[@bigjayrillah3508]

I wouldn’t say that digital sounds the same or better. Perhaps digital in mix played at the fidelity of a KZbin video may be perceived as sounding the same.

[@vegettoblue8705]

Digital : 0 or 1 Analog : 0 , all the values in between , 1 Example : 0.0001 , 0.0012 , etc etc All this values are missing in the digital world

[@PangaeaMusic]

this digital vs analog sounds boring. Use whatever you have available! when they are listening the music they have no ideia if you used digital or analog or that plugin or this plugin etc.