One of my longterm hobbies (since I was 14 - i'm now 29, so you do the maths) is guitar, i've loved the instrument since my teens and it's one of my main passions outside of computing and transhumanism.
Due to my mixed interests in computing and music i'm in a unique position to comment on some of the misconceptions that other musicians have about digital technology. As a geek I absolutely love anything that can be programmed - and as a guitarist I absolutely love having loads of cool tones and effects to play with, so I absolutely adore Line6 products - especially the ones that can be hacked with third-party software.
However, my fellow guitarists seem to have a weird sort of prejudice against digital models of classic valve amps. I've noticed that if they don't know it's a model, I get plenty of compliments on my tone - but the moment they even suspect it's a model (or even when it's real tubes and just happened to be controlled by my laptop) suddenly it's "that's nice, but it's not a real tube amp".
This strikes me as similar to the naturalistic fallacy that makes organic food so popular and scares people away from GMOs and "big pharma". It shouldn't be this way though.
Vacuum tubes are an older technology that are unreliable and take more maintenance to make work. If you compare them to a solid state analogue amp then there's no question about it - the tubes just sound so much better. But compared to a high-quality model? No difference.
But what is the sound ultimately? It's a time series of amplitudes - and if you consider that when recording it all ends up in a digital format anyway, if you arrive at the same amplitudes with the same frequency ranges via a mathematical model of a tube amp instead of directly from a physical tube, why does it matter?
When the model is good enough, human ears can not in fact tell the difference. The behaviour of a tube circuit can in fact be modelled mathematically and the only way to detect is by inspecting the hardware in use. It's feasible that the small amount of latency added by DSP processors could make it noticeable live (and on lower quality gear this can be quite annoying - not so with decent professional grade gear though, the latency is below any perceptible level).
But in recordings? It's just downright not possible.
Any fellow musicians and guitarists on steemit with a view on this? Let me know in the comments.
