If you’ve ever had a 9-5 office job, then you are well aware of the break room refrigerator. It is a place of great temptation and enormous possibility. When you roll in to the office in the morning and unload your brownbag special onto the bottom shelf, you can’t help but see that beautiful Salisbury steak in the Tupperware container on the shelf above. My friends, there is nothing more tempting than someone else’s lunch.
Do you remember the lunch time trades in middle school: swapping Lays for Doritos, peanut butter and jelly for ham and swiss, Fruit Roll-ups for Fruit by the Foot? It’s not even that you like Lays better than Doritos, but when you sit down at the lunch table or peer into the refrigerator, you know what you have. You’ve known since you packed it that morning. You grow to hate that tuna on white because it is a foregone conclusion. But somebody else’s lunch—that is new and exciting. It is surprising because it materializes out of the ether: without you spreading the mayo, without you packing it up, without it damning you from the passenger seat during morning traffic. It is a wholly unexpected option that presents itself without any input on your part whatsoever.
I think the same scenario applies with user interfaces: tape versus DAW, plug-in versus outboard. They all can do the same sort of things, and you know that once you get to a certain point there really isn’t that much difference between them, but for some reason analog just plain sounds better. Part of it is that the inner workings of an analog piece are obscured by the interface.
Below are two common de-essers, one outboard analog the other a plug-in. Which one seems more intuitive to you?
With analog outboard gear, the exact inner workings of this magic box are a mystery. Sure you know that you turn this knob and the compression ratio changes or the EQ bandwidth shrinks, but exactly how it does it is a mystery to most. The hieroglyphics on the faceplate often have no intrinsic merit, but rather are arbitrary increments that represent something else more accurately. (Think of that infamous amplifier in This is Spinal Tap. It goes to 11, but you could just make 10 louder and then there is no need to go to 11. 10 and 11 are just arbitrary units that co-relate to a specific amount of gain, but that amount is obscured by the interface.)
In a basic sense, you turn this knob and things suddenly sound better without you necessarily knowing the specifics of what is being changed and by how much. It’s simpler, it’s more elegant, and the results are not visual.
With a plug-in, you often see the changes being made. In a digital EQ, you see a visual representation of the frequency range, the shape, and the amount of change. The visual feedback causes you to judge things differently than turning a knob divorced of stimulus response. (Have you ever heard somebody say that your plug-in settings don’t “look” right? Isn’t this the audio business? How does it sound?) Users are more prone to making larger adjustments with visual feedback systems than they are when turning knobs—just look at any plug-in’s presets and you’ll see that they are usually wildly extreme.
This is not to say that the digital version of an 1176 is exactly equivalent to its analog counterpart. There are indeed harmonic differences, distortion characteristics, and sonic qualities that manifest when electronic components age, but these traits would cause an outboard 1176 to differ sonically from any other outboard 1176 as well. Indeed, given the kind of modeling analysis some digital emulators go through, the sonic characteristics of a digital 1176 are probably identical to at least one analog 1176 out there in the world.
So if the difference isn’t sonic, then the sonic difference likely stems from differences in how we tend to use analog and digital effects. I’ve heard numerous engineers say “Oh that plug-in sucks, I have to turn the compression up to 20:1 before it sounds like anything.” While this maybe true for cheap plug-ins that don’t go through rigorous modeling algorithms, I don’t think we can rule out the possibility that we simply believe a plug-in is different from it’s analog counterpart, so we perceive it differently, and therefore treat it differently.
Some readers out there may be familiar with legendary producer Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies. These are ways of randomizing your approach to a given situation. Oftentimes the results are surprising and pleasant and the same principle may be at work when we deal with analog interfaces—the fact that we aren’t intimately aware of the mechanics of what is happening when we apply an effect causes us to enjoy the outcome a little more.
So if some vintage piece of analog gear is too obscure to locate or maybe just prohibitively expensive, try out the digital version of it. Approach it like the real deal and let me know if the result is more desirable. I’d really like to know the results of approaching digital plug-ins with a sort of analog mindset. It just might be that my sandwich and your sandwich are interchangeable and we only perceive a difference because of how we regard them.
Hmmm, it almost makes you wonder if digital effects set via knob like interfaces have the same extreme setting problem. I use the Line 6 stuff where the digital effects have the same buttons and controls as their analogue counterparts, and I do find that it helps to dial in the right sound, and it keeps you from going for extreme settings.
The worst are the ones that allow you to input a number between 1-100 to control parameter X. You tend to move in notches of ten, and you can’t just tweak a dial while playing. So you tend to try either extreme and then figure out a middle ground. The result you get is probably way off from what you would dial in with sonic feedback.