Coincidentally my statement comes from the position of someone who has been building and designing analog synths for years and teaching exactly that on the university level.
The analog part of a synth can be meaningful and sometimes it is. But very often it is really not or can be adequately (or more then adequately) emulated digitally.
As a noise musician I am also aware that a lot of the interesting behavior of some circuits only comes to light under extreme conditions. It is a long standing pet peeve of mine that equipment tests always only test the gear in vanilla conditions. But quite frankly vanilla conditions are exactly what 99.9% of the musicians will use the gear with
> But quite frankly vanilla conditions are exactly what 99.9% of the musicians will use the gear with
Any filter resonance or guitar distortion/overdrive is not a "vanilla condition", so you're absolutely wrong.
In fact, the extreme conditions is precisely the reason why normies even listen to music. Nobody would care for electric guitar if it wasn't overdriven.
I also happen to play electrical guitar distorted half my life. Distortion isn't as complicated to emulate as you make it out to be. In fact the hardest part about doing digital distortion is having the analog frontend and the ADC be good enough, since you will add hefty (digital) gains to the signals.
Hoe do I know? I am working on a digital distortion pedal right now. If done right software emulation of guitar amplification chains is pretty good nowadays. Many touring musicians use Neural DSP Quad Cortex and Co nowadays.
I happen to also like the simplicity and robustness of just a stupid analog amp, but those aren't as special as the gearsnobs make them out to be.
The analog part of a synth can be meaningful and sometimes it is. But very often it is really not or can be adequately (or more then adequately) emulated digitally.
As a noise musician I am also aware that a lot of the interesting behavior of some circuits only comes to light under extreme conditions. It is a long standing pet peeve of mine that equipment tests always only test the gear in vanilla conditions. But quite frankly vanilla conditions are exactly what 99.9% of the musicians will use the gear with