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Analog fetishization is definitely annoying. But there are sometimes desirable features of simple analog equipment that are more complicated to implement in digital circuits. Sometimes that simplicty can be helpful to certain workflows, or aesthetically pleasing in its own right. A canonical example is the gentle peaking behavior of vacuum tube vs. digital amps. Even if it's true that you can get an arbitrarily good approximation of that gentler sound with an all digital circuit, I think some people just like having simple analog circuits that they can reason about more directly. Regardless of whether those mental models are physically accurate, if using an analog circuit allows a person to conceptualize the workflow in a way that leads to interesting art, that's what matters. And again, the aesthetic of the machinery itself can totally be worth something to a user, even if the circuit's functionality as a black box is no different than a digital circuit's.

I do agree about how annoying it is to see people misled about the quality of digital products, though, particularly for consumer goods where people aren't interested in the implementation details anyway. I'm not about to splurge on an analog amplifier for my speakers, and I don't think most consumers should bother doing so either (again, unless they really appreciate the implementation details of an analog circuit).

Yes, it is annoying but you can't say it is false. What is annoying is that he is actually right in practice. Most software developers including those in the industries where it should matter, do not care about latency or realtimeness, because in practice these things are so hard that no one really wants to pay developer time to bring latency from 100 ms back to 5 ms where it should be.

There are good technical reasons to go digital, and in theory, no drawbacks. Yet, is pisses me off that I need to boot a motherf%*$cking oscilloscope and wait several seconds.

I have spent the first years of my career at an AR company whose constant worry was to lower latency and maximize increase rate. I know this stuff is hard and as an unrecognizable handicap I now have an eye for all the small glitches in video: occasional fps slip, brief shearing, dropped frame, etc... I have yet to find a giant advertisement screen that had none of these.

Most people think 60 ms latency and 30 fps is good enough but let me tell you, we had a very different kind of reactions when we had less than 16 ms of latency (i.e. "one frame") and 60 fps display (or rather that annoying 59.94 Hz that TV asked us and forced us to feed to the software through a specific clock plug).

When people talk about the "analog feel", that's what they mean: full fps (usually 50Hz in Europe, 59.94Hz in US an Japan) and <16 ms latency. No glitch, no shear (though analog system can shear) and no framedrops. Very few digital systems actually live up to that standard.

It's possible, yes. It's also true that e.g. when you look at audio synthesizers, a shockingly large portion of the digital gear out there doesn't do it, making this a theoretical argument for a lot of the market, especially the cheaper end. Controllers or intermediate signals being sampled slowly or with too low resolution is a common complaint with digital or hybrid gear. There's also other, more general UX aspects that influence how an instrument feels to play that influence how it is used. So while I'm not fan of people insisting that they can get the perfect sound only with analog gear, I find the "but it's just math" arguments equally annoying.

I was not fully sold on digital synths until I used a Nord Modular. That thing was so responsive it convinced me that analog modeling could be just as fun and expressive.

Now I think some folks want particular analog sounds. There are digital replacements for most of them, and of course they are a lot more convenient, but they don't always sound _completely_ authentic. If you want the tuning instability, noise, distortion, etc., well, go ahead and maintain an antique synthesizer. It's kind of a pain, but if you really _must_ have the original sound, go for it.

What I miss is the quality of the actual keyboards. I had a chance to buy a vintage Yamaha KX-88 keyboard some years ago and I chickened out, and I regret it. If I had bought it, I'd probably be still enjoying it alongside my vintage DX-7.

> Oscilloscopes went full digital in 90's not because they were worse than analog counterparts.

The point, which you might have noticed when using digital and analogue oscilloscopes, is that delays come naturally in digital equipment. You _could_ probably get rid of it in all or most applications if you really made a point of doing so (and that would be very nice), but that is often not done.

> Oscilloscopes went full digital in 90's not because they were worse than analog counterparts

Kinda curious example to bring up; I was under the impression that early (ie 90s) digital oscilloscopes were quite seriously compromised, especially in the UX department.

Just like any technology, it took time to mature. You are hard pressed to find a brand new analog oscilloscopes today. WHY? Because, they provide enormous benefits even if the bandwidth was identical to analog counter parts. For one, you can't fricking store a waveform and look at it later (!!!)

We do a lot of high speed triggering in my electronics lab, and i can tell you that most low grade digital scopes cannot trigger fast enough. The $25,000 digital scope works, as do all of our old analog scopes.

Google indicates quite a few new analog oscilloscopes are available. My search term was just 'analog oscilloscope.' New and used ones are available.

The claim isn't that analogue oscilloscopes are generally superior. The claim is that they have responsive user interfaces, which digital equipment often does not, or at least didn't use to.

It's not even that it is, or was, impossible to make digital equipment with responsive interfaces. It's rather that the easiest way to do it often involves a delay.

Digital tends to have more latency by its nature. Parameter changes often produce zipper artifacts, stepping, etc. It's all solvable, but not uniformly solved.

>> "Digital tends to have more latency by its nature" - So...GPS satellites, atomic clocks, operation of a modern processor are full of latency that humans can detect? Human reaction time is in the order of 100ms. This statement makes zero sense. I honestly don't understand and I'd love you to explain what specific areas you think where this happens.

It makes perfect sense in this context of graphics software. You're forgetting that computer graphics are a heap of latency issues.

"I said, ‘No, that can’t be so, Larry,’ ” Eno recalled. “ ‘We’ve all worked to that track, so it must be right.’ But he said, ‘Sorry, I just can’t play to it.’ ” Eno eventually adjusted the click to Mullen’s satisfaction, but he was just humoring him. It was only later, after the drummer had left, that Eno checked the original track again and realized that Mullen was right: the click was off by six milliseconds. “The thing is,” Eno told me, “when we were adjusting it I once had it two milliseconds to the wrong side of the beat, and he said, ‘No, you’ve got to come back a bit.’ Which I think is absolutely staggering.”"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilia...

I play an online game (Overwatch) and I can tell the difference between a 20ms ping and a 40ms one, so I’m not surprised that an extremely proficient musician with a lifetime of practice can tell a difference of a few miliseconds.

In high school physics we were doing some experiments around pendulums and used metronomes to measure the period; I remember the teacher telling us about a former student of hers, a concert level musician, who could keep a beat in perfect timing without using a metronome at all.

You bet! A 20 ms diff makes a whole lot of difference also when you do high speed car racing!

Reaction time is not really relevant for musicians, they are more like operating on a continuous feedback loop with the sound and the instrument, so the sensitivity to latency is much higher. Afaik most good instruments aim to well below 10ms latencies.

And yes, digital audio typically inherently has some latency due processing typically being based on some buffers. Sure, you can try to make those buffers smaller but that is not always so easy to do.

This statement does make sense in the realm of audio processing. Moving from analog to TDM Digital, to Packetized Digital audio does add latency. Compare an analog radio (either two way or broadcast) without any digital signal processing, with a analog one with signal processing, to a digital one - each step in there, the latency goes longer.

On a full duplex phone call, you can tolerate quite a bit of latency, upwards of 600ms, provided there is no echo, as soon as echo is present, we notice the latency - but even on echo free calls, the longer the latency, the more likely both parties will end up speaking at the same time.

Musicians can detect latency as little as 1ms. It changes the "feel" of the instrument/equipment. It took until recently for digital gear to feel similar to analog, because it's an enormous engineering challenge to get digital equipment to be as responsive as the simplest analog equipment.

Responding to hyperbole with hyperbole isn’t a very productive way to get your point across.

Firstly, have you tried an analog synthesizer ?