Agreed 100% Vadim. Only a human can detect the design principle, thus focusing on the core points.
Moreover the engineer must also know why that gear is so good sounding and then investigate on its history. I remember the fuzz face was very difficult to produce because of the germanium transistors had a lot of parameter dispersions at that time. Jimi Hendrix himself tried a dozen at the shop and chose the one which was sounding best. Nonetheless germanium had leakeage but they were the only option at that time: afaik that design was completely random (the fuzz fx was not intended and probably they simply wanted to distort). This thing happens very often in analog gear design and that's why I think a dsp engineer must also have a musical background to understand how important are these aspects. My concern is what will happen to us when all the analog vintage stuff will be modeled.... muahahahah! I guess(hop) I will be retired! :) M. -----Messaggio originale----- Da: music-dsp-boun...@music.columbia.edu [mailto:music-dsp-boun...@music.columbia.edu] Per conto di Vadim Zavalishin Inviato: mercoledì 13 novembre 2013 12:54 A: A discussion list for music-related DSP Oggetto: Re: [music-dsp] R: R: Trapezoidal integrated optimised SVF v2 On 13-Nov-13 11:56, Marco Lo Monaco wrote: > I personally don’t think that automatic systems (DK) will be the > panacea of nonlinear modeling (even if everybody here is dreaming of a > realtime spice). Very often only a human can see patterns in circuits > and find shortcuts to simplify things. +1 Besides the shortcuts, only a human can judge the critical aspects of the analog model being discretized. Such as - how precise should the component models be (e.g. if Ebers-Moll transistor model is sufficient or not), where in principle this question should be answered for each component separately - whether the difference between parameter values of identically marked components is having any critical effect - whether the effect caused by a certain element of the model (e.g. a nonlinearity) is musically insignificant (so that the element may be dropped) - to which extent we can assume independence of different parts of the device (ignore the current leakage and other crosstalk) and so on. Perhaps, if in future we have computational powers several orders higher than the currently available ones, such automatic system would be more realistic, as we will be able to afford ridiculously precise and detailed analog component models as the basis of our discretization. But from my feeling it's still a long long way. And then, how important is being able to automatically convert from analog schematics to digital? I mean there has been some amount of brilliant engineering work to design those analog devices, but it's not happening much more. So, after we have modelled them all, we are not gonna need any further modelling. OTOH, the lessons we learned from attempting to model those things (and you learn more, if you do this "by hand" rather than by some automated toolkit) should form an invaluable basis for the development of future software. We can design *new* filters, effects, etc, which all are gonna have "that analog sound". For that purpose of new designs (rather than modelling the old stuff), I believe the *continuous-time* block-diagram based approaches are more useful than the differential equations, as they are offering a more intuitive view of the signal processing (YMMV). The discrete-time block-diagrams are not that intuitive, in my opinion, but then again, you don't need to use them, if you implicitly understand the discretized version of the same analog block-diagram. Regards, Vadim -- Vadim Zavalishin Reaktor Application Architect Native Instruments GmbH +49-30-611035-0 www.native-instruments.com -- dupswapdrop -- the music-dsp mailing list and website: subscription info, FAQ, source code archive, list archive, book reviews, dsp links http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/music-dsp http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/music-dsp -- dupswapdrop -- the music-dsp mailing list and website: subscription info, FAQ, source code archive, list archive, book reviews, dsp links http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/music-dsp http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/music-dsp
