So this comes down to the fundamental question of why is everything in music still so analog in this digital age? I was genuinely surprised when I first joined a band and found how archaic everything seemed to be. Even the terminology sounded vaguely steam punk. Condenser? You mean a capacitor?
I think historically, the problem was that anything that adds latency to your signal is bad news when you are performing. As a musician, any human-perceptible level of delay can throw you off your game, but there is also the possibility of unwanted sound artifacts coming out of things being slightly out of phase.
That said, I think things have come along far enough now that digital cabling could work on stage? They would have some advantages in that electrical noise would presumably be less of an issue with error-correcting protocols once the signal is in digital form? USB could be bad at the sampling point though if there is electrical noise in its power supply.
But I am not a sound engineer. I’m curious what others think about this? As a violin/fiddle guy, those 1/4" cables really weigh down the instrument and I think about this stuff from time to time.
Something weird with guitarist is that we want that bad fuzzy sound from low tech analog amplifiers. With today tech we can have high fidelity amps (even analog). However, we want some distorsion/grain ideally the same as on violonistes have an obsession for century old varnish, electric guitarists are obsessed by vintage electronic. To be fair all the issues from early electronic are what made the electric guitar sound cool.
Then another factor is that for a while, digital effect were pretty bad, and still have that reputation, they also look less cool than analog
I hear ya. I play in a celtic rock band where the violin basically fills the ecological niche of a lead guitar for instrumentals. So while I tend to prefer a clean acoustic sound, I do have a few pedals to add distortion and such.
Analog connections are very universal. You don’t need to deal with handshakes between devices, sample rate differences, clock systems etc. because each device receives and outputs analog signal via mostly the same 1/4" jacks and plugs.
While a digital signal chain would have overall latency benefits and fewer A/D/A conversions, it just doesn’t matter that much with modern hardware.
You already said the right answer. It’s the latency.
Sound is analogue. Both when it’s created and when it’s played back. Transforming it to digital takes time.
It makes sense to avoid that transformation in the signal chain for as long as possible before the “interface”, to avoid doing it more than once.
When seeing a band play live, you might be able to appreciate the fact that they’re technically forming one electric analogue circuit…
Also appreciate that vinyl records and tape can be made without ever being digital. I think it’s pretty wild that we can even take a sound, put it on a record and play it back, thereby transferring data without it being digital. The whole process is much more interesting.
Imagine someone hitting a drum so hard that it makes a microphone membrane move, which makes an electric current, that pushes a needle into a record making a dent deep enough that your record player can feel it on the needle and create an electric signal to move your speaker membrane.
It might take some time to do, but when your ears hear that soundwave its basically the same motion that the drummer did originally. It has not been converted to a digital representation of what happened and back. It is the physical “shadow” of what actually happened.
I think it’s kinda cool. I make digital music myself and while it has other cool stuff, I’ll never bad mouth analogue.
Yeah. A signal chain that is entirely analog from instrument to PAs is the gold standard for latency. It’s awesome when it works!
I guess the problem is when it doesn’t, it can be a trouble-shooting nightmare, as noise could potentially creep in at any stage. As a violinist, it’s an ongoing battle for me since signal-to-noise is always poorer than with a guitar, given a small instrument simply can’t put out as much sound energy.
So I’m fussing with pre-amps, active DIs, and the like. Sometimes I think if I could just digitize the signal close to the source, I could get a better result? Probably just wishful thinking though.
So this comes down to the fundamental question of why is everything in music still so analog in this digital age? I was genuinely surprised when I first joined a band and found how archaic everything seemed to be. Even the terminology sounded vaguely steam punk. Condenser? You mean a capacitor?
I think historically, the problem was that anything that adds latency to your signal is bad news when you are performing. As a musician, any human-perceptible level of delay can throw you off your game, but there is also the possibility of unwanted sound artifacts coming out of things being slightly out of phase.
That said, I think things have come along far enough now that digital cabling could work on stage? They would have some advantages in that electrical noise would presumably be less of an issue with error-correcting protocols once the signal is in digital form? USB could be bad at the sampling point though if there is electrical noise in its power supply.
But I am not a sound engineer. I’m curious what others think about this? As a violin/fiddle guy, those 1/4" cables really weigh down the instrument and I think about this stuff from time to time.
Something weird with guitarist is that we want that bad fuzzy sound from low tech analog amplifiers. With today tech we can have high fidelity amps (even analog). However, we want some distorsion/grain ideally the same as on violonistes have an obsession for century old varnish, electric guitarists are obsessed by vintage electronic. To be fair all the issues from early electronic are what made the electric guitar sound cool.
Then another factor is that for a while, digital effect were pretty bad, and still have that reputation, they also look less cool than analog
I hear ya. I play in a celtic rock band where the violin basically fills the ecological niche of a lead guitar for instrumentals. So while I tend to prefer a clean acoustic sound, I do have a few pedals to add distortion and such.
Analog connections are very universal. You don’t need to deal with handshakes between devices, sample rate differences, clock systems etc. because each device receives and outputs analog signal via mostly the same 1/4" jacks and plugs.
While a digital signal chain would have overall latency benefits and fewer A/D/A conversions, it just doesn’t matter that much with modern hardware.
You already said the right answer. It’s the latency.
Sound is analogue. Both when it’s created and when it’s played back. Transforming it to digital takes time. It makes sense to avoid that transformation in the signal chain for as long as possible before the “interface”, to avoid doing it more than once.
When seeing a band play live, you might be able to appreciate the fact that they’re technically forming one electric analogue circuit…
Also appreciate that vinyl records and tape can be made without ever being digital. I think it’s pretty wild that we can even take a sound, put it on a record and play it back, thereby transferring data without it being digital. The whole process is much more interesting.
Imagine someone hitting a drum so hard that it makes a microphone membrane move, which makes an electric current, that pushes a needle into a record making a dent deep enough that your record player can feel it on the needle and create an electric signal to move your speaker membrane.
It might take some time to do, but when your ears hear that soundwave its basically the same motion that the drummer did originally. It has not been converted to a digital representation of what happened and back. It is the physical “shadow” of what actually happened.
I think it’s kinda cool. I make digital music myself and while it has other cool stuff, I’ll never bad mouth analogue.
Yeah. A signal chain that is entirely analog from instrument to PAs is the gold standard for latency. It’s awesome when it works!
I guess the problem is when it doesn’t, it can be a trouble-shooting nightmare, as noise could potentially creep in at any stage. As a violinist, it’s an ongoing battle for me since signal-to-noise is always poorer than with a guitar, given a small instrument simply can’t put out as much sound energy.
So I’m fussing with pre-amps, active DIs, and the like. Sometimes I think if I could just digitize the signal close to the source, I could get a better result? Probably just wishful thinking though.
A good microphone is probably the best option for violin.