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Interesting!
Link to the paper mentioned in the video
AI recreations of the human voice will eventually surpass the original in signal to noise, accuracy and so on, it will have its uses, but perfection could become really boring.
cheers, nice one
LOL! synchronicity! I was listening to this video in the background when I clicked this post.
Is that the full paper? Almost in its entirety it seems to be about a single point (64-bit wordlength), which should objectively be the single most uninteresting factoid in any contemporary article titled Why Modern Digital Synthesis Is More Analog Than Analog.
Okay - so we're not saying a word about discrete vs continuous time, but at least we're covering the Y axis, or voltages as represented in PCM, right? The article mentions some precise numbers - making it fair game for a little scrutiny.
Well, here's the thing if we want to talk about bits (remember: this is the least interesting part about synthesis or being analog):
In floating point, general arithmetic in general cases is a lossy operation.
These losses are magnified over time. On feedback paths, or when using iterative methods (e.g. solvers in circuit models), the effects of finite-precision arithmetic can cascade into actually measurable noise which will be a far cry from what we'd expect from a resolution of "9 quadrillion to one" or "2 thousandths of a trillionth of a volt". During my career sometimes I had to hunt down platform differences when compiling floating-point DSP code that resulted in significant differences in output on different devices.
See, how much information can fit inside a small paragraph? The article is many times longer than that, and for me it really doesn't answer the attention-grabbing question posed in the title. Given a good answer, the clickbaity title would be absolutely warranted and I would have zero problems with it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence or something.
Considering the title and the state of the art when it comes to analog emulations, it would have been a no-brainer to write an article about mitigating discrete time effects instead. That is a much greater, richer and more diverse source of imprecision (or loss of practicality due to high latency), where his solutions would undoubtedly generate a lot of interest, or his approach to avoiding these problems. Even if he wouldn't want to share the secret sauce, he could have written a highly abstract summary and that would have grabbed the attention of lots of various folks with different levels of skill or interest. Maybe he couldn't do it without revealing too much, but then why write the article at all? I don't want to be negative, but this is just really bad by today's standards.
In a HW module system this author is versed in I would really like to see a high-quality writeup and analysis about medium to high-order (or even infinite) ADC / DAC chains, I think that would be genuinely interesting.
As for software plugins the ADC / DAC issue is gone, but it's replaced with another one (which is why you can't have a Morpheus filter emulation, as asked recently here in the forum).
As a DSP guy, I will do everything to evangelize its marvels, and on the user's side of things, I'm not wowed by the magic of analog gear, and definitely won't get excited about any new analog kit I see on Kickstarter or in TechCrunch-esque articles - even if I should be. I'd probably care much more if I was more heavily invested in the subtleties of the nonlinear game.
But as a DSP guy, I also have a clear understanding of what the limits of DSP are. Maybe some of these limits will be lifted one day, but for now, they're here to stay. And you'll be bumping into them sooner before you can say 2 thousandths of a trillionth of a volt.
For anyone who's interested a bit more: limit cycles, denormals, CIC filters (e.g. in oversampling) are also pertinent to our understanding of what the real (effective) bit depth is. But that's assuming no other source of distortion exists in a particular build, which is certainly possible, but that could limit the kind of synthesis or processing you could build.
I’m currently tormenting myself in photography over bit depth – a jpeg is 8 bit per channel, a typical raw format might be 14 bits or so depending, a modern HEIF might well be 10 bit, and although we can’t visually discriminate all steps of even 8 bits, we can when it comes to application of transformations such as colourspaces, gamma alterations, and compositing, which might on a bad day result in tonal quantisation or banding/stepping of smooth skies etc (plus I’m highly interested in in-camera multiple exposure and most of the current crop of cameras won’t even give you a heic or raw, just a jpeg, in a scenario where a heic could actually hold all the constituent frames and present an output composite without permanently burning them together)
In audio terms though, I’m quite open to the idea that component modelling such as Roland’s ACB etc is a good way forward because you’re able to have magical theoretical components that don’t have the noise disadvantages of real components, up until you hit the DAC, which might not even be in or part of the originating system – then anything can happen
and even when it is, such as in the case of the NTS-1, Korg have managed to arrange the grounding isolation such that connecting it to USB makes it horrendously noisy, unplugging it cures that but also cures it of ever receiving any midi over the usb port too
When the System 1m came out I was really interested in that – now it’s old and things must’ve improved, but I really thought that a ‘modular’-ish with patch leads etc but digital behind the panel was a good way forward
Where I disagree with the video is the idea that it can all be done one control at a time on a computer – I’d like several knobs at once (who wouldn’t)
I watched this video last night! I agree with many things and yet I disagree also.
I’ve heard my hydrasynth sound amazingly and convincingly analog…but there is still aliasing present at times
I’ve heard my Waldorf iridium just blow my mind…
I think I am in the hybrid crowd more. Digital convenience and digital capabilities, but I still like analog’s unpredictabilities, noise, and lossiness at times. I would never sell my gear for the reason of one is better than the other in some mathy way.
The video is great, and Anthony is fantastic. He made a great deal with that Moog IIIc. If I ever start to collect analog synths, I will spread that story about analog vs. digital like there is no tomorrow, haha.
Well… I switched off the video, i read the linked paper. I think the logic of “the hot take” is very flawed, many fallacies.
Quite simply, Higher resolution doesn’t mean it’s better.
Its still a computer and theres an old saying… garbage in… garbage out. It’s possible to make crappy analogue synths too.
I did the opposite. Watched the video all the way through, never gained interest in reading the paper. The thoughtful and civil conversation between these two respected figures of synth history was enough for me.
Love my real analogs but also love my VAs, as well as unapologetically digital synths.