Analog vs digital

One of the spoke’s two founding through-lines (the other is modular-routing): the argument over continuous-voltage circuitry versus sampled, computed sound, which runs across both the instruments that make sound and the effects that process it.

The two poles

• Analog — the audio is a continuous electrical signal, shaped directly by circuit components (oscillators, filters, resistor/capacitor/transistor stages). The claimed payoff is a “warmer” / more organic character, immediate (low-latency) response, and simplicity; the cost is fixed behaviour, no recall, and (often) one job per box.
• Digital — the audio is sampled (ADC), manipulated as numbers by an algorithm (DSP), and reconstructed (DAC). The payoff is programmability, versatility, many functions in one unit, and exact preset recall; the argument against is a colder or “less organic” character and (historically) latency.
• Hybrid — an analog signal path or front end paired with digital control/effects, pitched as the best of both; increasingly the default rather than a compromise.

Where it shows up in this spoke

• Instruments. All-analog synths trade on this exact character claim — the filtopia filterbank, polyuanalog, the test-equipment purists music-from-test-equipment — against digital methods like granular-synthesis and fm-synthesis. The synthesizer page carries the analog↔digital axis as one of its defining dimensions.
• Effects. The guitar-pedal is the effects-side stage: analog for overdrive/fuzz (circuit nonlinearity is the tone), digital for delay/reverb/modulation (memory + math) analog-vs-digital-pedals. The software audio-effect-plugin is digital by construction, so it’s the far-digital end of the same line.

Measured, at last — and only the sampling half

Added 2026-08-08 via the research pass. Two AES papers put numbers where this page had only the argument.

meyer-moran-adda-loop inserted a CD-standard 16-bit/44.1 kHz A/D/A round trip into high-resolution playback, double-blind, over a year, across professional monitors and electrostatic systems: undetectable by any subject on any system. digital-filter-audibility isolated the filters inside that conversion and found listeners are sensitive to them. Both peer-reviewed, opposite verdicts on adjacent questions, and both kept.

What survives the disagreement is enough to sharpen this page. The character difference does not come from sampling. Whatever people hear between an analog box and a digital one is coming from the circuit — filter topology, nonlinearity, the specific implementation — not from the fact that one of them counted the signal. The section below reached that conclusion by reasoning; it now has measurement behind it, and the “colder / less organic” line in the digital pole above should be read as a claim about designs, not about digitizing.

Untested here: whether an analog filter and its DSP model are discriminable. That is the claim instrument makers actually make, and no source in this wiki measures it.

The through-line

The recurring lesson is that the divide is less about “which sounds better” than about what each buys you — analog buys immediacy and a specific nonlinear character; digital buys flexibility, recall, and density — and that hybrids increasingly dissolve the binary. It pairs with modular-routing: together they’re the two axes the spoke reads almost every instrument and effect against (how it’s routed, and whether it’s continuous or sampled).

The trade shows up in the supply chain too (2026-07-28)

hermetic-alchemy-lab runs on an Electrosmith Daisy — and so, per the same source, do Noise Engineering’s Versio/Alia/Legio and Bastl’s Kastle 2. Separate boutique brands, one commodity DSP board.

That’s this axis at the business layer. In analog the circuit is the product: filtopia‘s five-filter parallel bank isn’t something a competitor can drop into their own panel, and polyuanalog publishing its board files is a genuine disclosure. Digital makes the compute fungible, so identity moves up into the panel, the jack layout and the DSP code. Same trade the page describes for sound — analog’s character is fixed in the circuit, digital’s is a file — read one level out, where it decides what a company actually owns.