Wiardgroup

Hi Kwote
(i want to give fair warning about hanging out with old reprobates
like me , Sheriff Mike may (with good reason) put us both in the
stockade for a night for engaging in a round of the 'digital is
sterile-analog is dirty' wild-goose chase on this ostensibly topical
forum)

but here goes...

--- In wiardgroup@yahoogroups.com, "kwote uno" <kwoter@...> wrote:
> i think a big part of that though is the
> massive amount of analog most modules carry making it hard for
digital to be
> nothing more than a nice sidekick to the sound.

speaking from a vantage point of under-the-hood, i'd characterize the
digital portion of the Waveform City/miniwave and noise ring as far
more integral to the sound than a sidekick. i'd call them both true
hybrids. 
They both exploit DACs (venerable, ultra-digital, 8-bit DACs as in the
hallowed Mirage** in Grant's personal history). The DACs are at the
last stage*** and that makes for a pretty 'staircase-y' output wave.
On the other side of the hybrid equation, they are both driven
(clocked) by very NON-digital imprecise analog circuits. But the
output audio is unequivocally 8-bit digital.
Neither portion of the circuit is subservient to the other and the
final product; the sound, is equally dependent on both the digital
component and the analog for it's character. You couldn't make an all
analog miniwave or noise ring...much less improve them by doing so.

>
> i think for me it's the feeling i get from the music and my
experience with
> digital has been disappointing but listening to all the soundclips
of the
> noisering from the old wiard page makes me gasp in terror and glee
at the
> grit, etc. it brings my way.
> correct me if i'm wrong but
> those are the feelings i've felt recently.
>

you CAN'T be wrong!
precisely because it's your -feelings- that your talking about. 
The 'terror' and 'glee' you cite aptly describe my own reactions to 
Wiard designs, They scratch my particular itch better than any but my
own DIY designs BECAUSE Grant does not eschew digital circuits simply
for the trivial and arbitrary reason that they aren't 'analog'.****

and thus 
in the hands of an inspired designer, Vive La Digitale!


i decided to engage this subject for two reasons:
1) the sonic quality of analog vs. digital argument is (IMHO) moot at
this point in time.
2) Prof. Richter has done some very creative and -artistic- things
with 'obsolete' , but 'VERY digital' circuits. He's done so with a
very high degree of success in a market where the term 'analog' is
conflated with 'excellence'.

...and with the envelooper he's about to do this even more 


This leaves a very interesting (and ultimately unanswerable) question:
What does the term 'analog' mean?

Is a 96Khz/24-bit recording of a Moog 'analog'?

Is the output of a Korg Triton 'digital' when it's physically
impossible for a loudspeaker to move in discrete steps?

It can be argued that analog is best described by birds hearing other
birds...

...and they don't care!
;'>

A discussion of this could to open enough cans of worms to take this
group beyond it's March 2007 record of 200 posts before Turkey day
...but ... instead , we should probably do our duty to revive the US
economy by getting out there and SHOPPING.

Wiard's pre-Xmas order hot line is 414 769 0791 BTW!

thanx for raising such a deep question!
-doc

**
the digital/analog hybrid model (ie DCO-> analog VCF-> analog VCA) was
a very short-lived species in the ruthless commercial evolution of the
 keyboard synth. One that, IMHO, got very short shrift in light of
it's potential. Korg & Ensoniq did some great-sounding keyboards using
this model for a very short time in the '80's. Let's face it, if
you're going to insist on your oscillators staying in equal-tempered
(et al) tune over 10 octaves (Homer Simpson shouts "Bo-oring!), then
it makes overwhelming sense to let digital do one of the jobs it does
BEST ;namely, stay rock-steady, consistently, in a huge range of
environments. The analog VCO's i've heard that track 'perfectly' with
such vast precision sound like high-quality DCO's to me anyway....i
don't see much reason to go to the trouble to make them analog. The
real fun comes when you smear that signal with some wobbly, funky
analog schmutz in later stages , downstream, with far less precision.
  i am very happy to see that Dave Smith revisited this fertile model
in his Prophet'08 offering. 
This is a hugely subjective perspective, of course. There are artists
who require high-precision analog gear to do strict tonal and
microtonal work. (Lamonte Young comes to mind) but there's plenty of
fun to be had WITHOUT that precision here amongst the groundlings.
(the muppets drummer 'animal' was always close to my heart)
 
***
ie:
http://www.wiard.com/1200/NR/Noise_Ring.html

****
Grant hardly invented this concept. The Waveform City is an evolution
of the VCDO. Digisound offered a VCDO in the late 70's, Don Buchla
experimented with them in the late 60's. The fabled PPG was a
wavetable VCDO with downstream analog processing. Modcan,and MFB offer
modern ones for sale too. 
  Also, there are many modern makers who offer variations  on the
VC-resolution DAC formula as a processor. It seems to me that the
digital/analog hybrid is  a very fertile paradigm even among analog
'purists'