Is Bucket Brigade Delay Analog?

We know what "digital" sounds like, and we know what "analog" sounds like... and BBD is definitely not digital. Does that make it analog? Is it one-or-the-other? Do labels even matter? Did I leave the iron plugged in?
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Chapters
0:00 - The Argument
1:37 - Definitions
3:15 - Continuity vs Sampling
6:23 - How Does BBD Work?
10:10 - The (non)-Conclusion

[@paulbellamy2810]

Continuity in real life movement... well, there's the old Loop Quantum Gravity idea, which seems to suggest there's a minimum length of time between one event and the next. Approximately 1 femtosecond, IIRC. If this is true, the universe clock speed/frame rate is about 1 octillion frames per second (according to my admittedly rough calculations). So, even then, there is a step between one movement or state and the next. Tiny for sure, but there all the same.

[@StompboxBreakdown]

This is awesome. I’m gonna start referring to my delay times in femtoseconds

[@gophercrow]

50% musical gear, 50% science nerd stuff, 100% my kind of channel. I enjoyed this video thoroughly.

[@StompboxBreakdown]

The math checks out! Happy to entertain

[@jheminghsu]

So it's discrete-time signal but not quantized. If there's no A/D D/A stage it's analog.

[@mp-ov9dh]

This is how i learned it. Digital is ones ad zeros, if an analog signal (sinewave) goes into an analog to digital converter then its being ripped apart and turned into ones and zeros. it gets processed digitally then goes into a digital to analog converter to be turned back into an analog signal (sinewave). as stated above, if no A/D D/A converter its analog, if it has A/D D/A its digital

[@emilyharpist]

Thank you for this amazing video! Really informative and helpful!

[@StompboxBreakdown]

Thank You, Em! I’m glad you enjoyed it

[@backlom]

Wow. Emily Hopkins!! You guys should do a collaboration. This channel needs some extra time in the spotlight!!

[@dylacious92]

Get this man on a JHS live stream

[@AlanW]

Thanks, this was fascinating! Interesting thing to think about!

[@erifkind]

This is one of the best pedal videos ever. Truly enlightening AND ducking hilarious 😂

[@StompboxBreakdown]

Thanks, Eddie!!

[@macsarcule]

You must be reading my mind. I’ve been thinking about this for months. My take: definitely not digital because there’s no digitization, as you mentioned. I do tend to think of it being as analog as anything that’s using fully discrete components, like a through-hole circuit. Just because the bbd chip has miniaturized capacitors etc., doesn’t take away from them being capacitors. Even the clock cycles, which sound pretty digital in concept, aren’t really different from how a quartz watch works. We’re oscillating a physical crystal with electricity. It’s just been selected or tuned for the frequency one wants. Seems pretty analog and even physical; there’s genuine, physical oscillation going on, it’s just really tiny. Really cool episode! More of these! ✌️😌🎸

[@astrodadmusic]

Did I just sit through math class? Excellent video, good sir! Your channel is by far one of my favorites. I really appreciate how you explain, describe, analyze, annotate, and demonstrate. You never say “this pedal is dookie,” or “that pedal is the shiznit.” (Not that you’d actually use those words.) You clearly show us how much use can come from each pedal, but you leave it up to us to decide whether it’s our thang. Or thing. Anyway, thanks for the fun lesson, even though the hot dog question broke my brain. Cheers!

[@StompboxBreakdown]

A guitarist hasn’t fully seen the light until they’ve been made to feel about two feet tall, standing there with a board full of boutique, internet-approved, top-mounted-jack, limited edition artwork pedals, while some dude with a Squire Strat through a duct-taped DS-1 into a Gorilla amp delivers the most absolutely wonderful tones the world has ever heard. I’d never call any pedal garbage or a must-have because I’m different peoples hands, pedals do different things. Every pedal has its place, even the Boss Digital Metalizer

[@astrodadmusic]

Well said, my friend. Gear is just that: gear. Each piece comes without skill-enhancers or magic creativity dust; it’s up to the player to bring those. Which means I’m on permanent two-feet-tall status. Now, where can I get me one of them Gorilla amps? 🤘🏻

[@DavidChandekStark]

Fantastic explanation. I dug the ride.

[@ianratzer]

Awesome video. Got me thinking. If a voltage isn't being turned into a number that represents it, it's wrong to call the process digital. So BBD's aren't digital - they're "discrete-time sampled" analog devices. The way we usually employ the bucket brigade metaphor has always bugged me. We say "passing the buckets along the line." In that arrangement, each person in the line could be handing off and receiving a bucket at the same time. So the total water capacity of the line is the volume of a bucket times the number of people. But in an actual BBD, half of the capacitors are empty at any given moment in time. They have to be in order for the samples of charge to trickle forward and not cross-contaminate. It's more like a bucket brigade where every person hangs onto one bucket, and dumps their water into the next person's bucket before turning to receive the water from their upstream neighbor. So person 1 is pouring into person 2's bucket, while 3 pours into 4 etc. Then they turn and 2 is pouring into 3, 4 is pouring into 5, and so on, while person 1 is filling up from the lake. It's messy and there's spillage, as is the case with an electronic BBD. Hence why you have to divide the number of stages by 2 when calculating the delay time: 4096 stages / 2 stages per effective sample = 2048 samples; 2048 samples / 10,000 samples per second = 0.205 seconds of delay. Though I was able to run my last MN3005-based build at a much lower clock, and got about 350 ms before I got any nastiness. Also the Rubberneck doesn't use an MN3205, it uses CoolAudio V3205's - four of them, for an advertised 1.5 seconds of delay time. Which means the clock is at 5461 Hz at max delay. I love that pedal.

[@StompboxBreakdown]

Thanks for the info! I wonder if it's tolerances or just to have a nice round number they specify the faster clock speed in the datasheet. And yeah, you caught me on the mn/v3205, I just blurred out the "mn" part in the video to avoid confusion.

[@MYGAS21]

Loved it! Pure Nerdyness. Thank you.

[@StompboxBreakdown]

Absolutely, I love uncovering rocks, even if it’s just to satisfy my own curiosity.

[@mr-iz8cx]

Wow! Great educational style. I'm one step further away from being a luddite. You oughta make 'The Big BBD' I'd love to see that. And anything that explains variables in technology makes me a better musician, so thanks for that too

[@shadowcat4372]

Think I need to watch this a couple more times to fully understand but this is the closest I've ever been to understanding this stuff so thank you for doing this topic!

[@inkpad100]

This channel is a great service to it's audience, and I look forward to each video. Just remind me never to get into an argument of technical details with you.🙂

[@StompboxBreakdown]

Thank you! I prefer not to think of them as arguments but interesting wrinkles in our own use of labels. I think the analog label was applied retroactively because people needed to differentiate from the early digital pedals of the 90's. Like how no one said "standard definition" until "high definition" was a thing. I just want people to think about the words they're using instead of just "It's analog because analog sounds like this"

[@backlom]

No headrests! Now I’ve got something else taking up space in my mind. Thanks. Lol. You didn’t even touch a guitar this episode- and it didn’t even matter. This was an interesting subject. Today I’m purchasing a used Emperor V2!! Just had to tell someone who might care more than my wife.

[@StompboxBreakdown]

Hahaha, I always care about pedals. It’s ok, sometimes wives just don’t understand.

[@henriquecorreia9917]

you are the university of pedals...

[@stefansynths]

Excellent explanation and 100% correct! Now that you mention it, film has less claim for analog than BBD. Besides being discrete in time, film is limited in its resolution by the film grain. You can keep making higher resolution scans, but eventually you're just getting more detail on the film grain, not the image. If you want to go deeper, look at the difference between sampling noise and quantization noise. "Digital" suffers from both, BBD only suffers from the former. But because digital is easy to scale to higher sample rates and bit depths, both are moot these days.

[@StompboxBreakdown]

I went down a *deep* rabbit hole on sampling noise and quantization noise, but couldn't figure out how to present it here without sounding like Charlie from Always Sunny in Philadelphia talking about Pepe Silvia.

[@stefansynths]

@@StompboxBreakdown Yep, I think you hit the right balance here.

[@max_destro]

Great video, though I'm slightly annoyed that you pre-empted the argument I was formulating that time and space are not continuous... thorough as always!

[@StompboxBreakdown]

Gotcha!

[@retrochannel1763]

Nice kind of philosophical lesson about these things. If you go deeper into quantum mechanics, you would find shockingly out, that actually the whole universe works digitally, because there is no absolute continuity. Reality is quantized by Planck number. But we feel it as continuum, because our sense don't registrate such small gaps. So it works with film and sound. Interesting video. More than: " by this, because it sounds warm!" :-D

[@caseybutt5553]

BBD is not digital. It is analog. It is a sequence of analog "samples". The "samples" are not stored digitally, they are snapshots taken on a "clock" timer but there are no digital conversions involved. Your example of film is perfect. Film is not digital, it is a sequence of "analog" images. Traditional cartoons are not digital, they are a sequence of "analog" drawings. A strobe light does not convert everything in the room to digital as it flashes on and off. BBDs simply pass an analog sample through a sequence of analog delays until it reaches the other end... still analog. Otherwise, capacitors would also have to be considered digital devices.

[@StompboxBreakdown]

Bingo on the capacitor comment, I *almost* ended with a statement similar to that, but I thought it was getting a bit too long. Thank you for your thoughts, I think my opinions fall along the same lines.

[@SD_UK]

I have an early Boss DD-3 'Digital Delay' which is .. mainly Analog :) - way, way my favourite Delay and sounds kinda half way between A & D

[@chancecgbdingle5438]

👍

[@aaronherdman5008]

I see them as context-dependent terms, similar to "subjective" and "objective." Your experience is an objective fact, but the content of your experience is subjective. Whether or not a thing is analog or digital depends upon what aspect of it you are attending to.

[@BitcoinTakeover]

This was great, thank you!

[@StompboxBreakdown]

Thanks!! Really glad you enjoyed it

[@el0blaino]

Damn, now I have to look at headrests for the rest of my life.

[@therewasascene]

My eyebrows were not uneven - they were decidedly furrowed

[@waynegram8907]

Which analog delay pedals do PRE-Delay? Try doing a YT lesson about which analog delay pedals do PRE-delays to get that EVH bounce effect he got using the echoplex as a predelay

[@michaelt2842]

My head hurts.

[@al271987]

My brain hurts.

[@fedir_sh]

Yes! So I think, why everywhere BBD is called analog?? While it's a chip! Maybe this duality is hard for BBD too, who knows )))) To be where two worlds collide is always hard. And I thank you for this video, very interesting.

[@commandoPR]

How do you define chips? CMOS? Anything in a DIP, QFP or similar package? Is a TL072 digital to you?

[@randyinmpls5413]

Oops, did you forget that link to the article?

[@StompboxBreakdown]

Yup, fixing now edit: fixed

[@marcusbeyer8481]

BBD chips store the samples in a physical form, i.e. a voltage potential, not in a digital/binary datum. BBD is pretty obviously analogue. Call it solid state, sure, and it is functioning in a way very similar to a digital delay, but the actual function of the chip is purely analogue. No software, no programming, no algorithms, just solid state logic and devices that function the way they do because of their *physical* arrangement

[@michaelfowler3187]

Awesome video!! Great info and well articulated for less experienced like myself. Also good luck with the porno project! Hehhe

[@StompboxBreakdown]

Thanks man, we’re hoping to wrap early next weeWAIT A MINUTE!!!

[@prism223]

Name proposal: Sampled analog

[@mombius9505]

i would consider bucket brigade pedals to be digital as they don't have a cpu or function using a coding language

[@coastalgeorgia6558]

last few minutes of video unplayable, could be my end. anyway call it what you like. no a/d ,d/a converters is considered analog in our sphere. i enjoy your videos, like that you dig past the obivius of products.

[@DavidRavenMoon]

You’re incorrect in the assumption that digital audio is lacking resolution. The myth is that digital audio appears as steps. There is no steps on playback. There can be no steps on playback. Why? Because that would require infinite resolution. Steps would be a square wave. But the slew rate in analog gear rounds off the corners. So you can never have a totally sharp square wave. And not at 44khz. Digital audio only requires TWO samples per cycle to represent a perfect smooth sine wave. So for a 4khz tone, you need to sample it at 8khz. Digital audio can ONLY play back a perfect sine wave. It’s not “a representation” of the original recording. It’s a PERFECT reproduction of the original audio. Also you cannot hear the difference on any sample rate higher than 48kHz. This is proven in null tests.

[@NoOne-sn2si]

Uh, no... CDs have a 44.1 khz sample rate. If you put the output of a CD player on an oscilloscope and get the resolution high enough, you will not see a "pure" sine wave. You will see a sine wave that is very stepped. CD players have various filters to smooth the steps but it's still stepped. CDs suck in sound quality. Sure the S/N ratio is very high but the sample rate is way too low for decent sounding audio. SACD was a HUGE improvement, but this is because the sample rate of SACD is like 2.8mHz, much better.

[@NoOne-sn2si]

Anybody who says BBD is digital is full of shit... Digital has two output states, either 100% on or 100% off. No in between. BBDs do chop up the signal in teeny tiny pieces but they are of various charge states (analog). Not completely on or completely off (digital). Yes BBDs do use clocks to get things running which is kind of getting into the digital realm but the samples are analog. Plus, there's no A to D or D to A converters in BBDs...

[@JasonAyalaSpare]

You wouldn't happen to be a science teacher would you?

[@StompboxBreakdown]

Nope. But I am an instructor.

[@JasonAyalaSpare]

@@StompboxBreakdown that I believe

[@jacobbrown1690]

Real analog is made from discrete circuits. On chip circuits arent really truly analog. Thats the difference between the OBX and OBXA….

[@StompboxBreakdown]

When you say discrete circuits compared with on-chip circuits, which side of the fence would you put an opamp, like an LM-158?

[@NoOne-sn2si]

Total BS, like SBB said, op amps are on "chips" but they are purely analog. Op amps could be used as a digital amp but they are all analog in internal function. In fact, purely digital chips like the CD4049UBE can be used as an analog amp, they make great fuzz circuits. It doesn't matter what the circuit does, it's all about the information the chip passes... Is the output variable or only totally on or totally off with no in-between?