Analogue warmth

[yabaVR]

I don’t think I’m getting my point across. I’m not saying that the very best of digital can’t sound fantastic. It can...indeed it better as I’ve just bought a Devialet and an Innuos streamer. What I am saying is that the vast majority of digital music we hear sounds like crap and the reason it does is that its manipulated, filtered, compressed and condensed to the point very little of the original music remains. It’s not so much that digital can’t sound musical, because it can. But the argument that people prefer analog recordings because of its inherent distortions is just rubbish. People prefer analog recordings above the majority of consumer digital because the digital has been so badly mauled and mutilated that very little of the original music remains. Listen to a carefully recorded high resolution 24/96+  File through a capable DAC and it sounds great...good enough that consumers almost certainly aren’t going to pine for old analog recordings. But that’s the bleeding edge of digital technology, where you guys live. For the most part and for the vast majority of the music consuming public, the digital recordings they hear every day and that people buy and download are nothing like that. They are at best 16/44.1 and at worst some hideous sounding MP3
So again, the reason people are pining over the warmth in good analog recordings is not because they are distorted...its because the digital cattle fodder they’re being fed is sooo bad and utterly lacking in any musical attributes.

+1
...and I think the problem here is that many of us don't take into account that a distorted or altered digital signal has nothing to do with a distorted or altered analog signal. In technical terms the impact of the unwanted side effects when altering a digital signal compared to an analog signal is completely different. That's why it is almost impossible to compare them directly.
The appearing sound patterns by manipulating the audio signal are different in each domain (digital vs. analog) but many of us try to compare them with equal words and terms. Our languange is very limited while wishing to be precise here.

My thoughts on this are:

Analog.
If recording analog the audio signal stays very coherent on the time domain during the whole process of recording/mastering etc. There might also be some errors in the time domain in analog recordings but these errors stay (timely) coherent in the signal. It's like a fluid...nothing is cut hard and put back on another time line hence the brain can address distortion etc. (ignore it or change it by imagination). I can imagine that distortions even give emphasis on the perception of a coherent time line...a naturallness.
All together everything in an analog signal stays in a natural domain (timeline) (distorted or not) and this kind of naturalness the brain can handle with ease (that's why it's called natural   ). Its easy for the brain to tell that this pattern is a distortion and the other is a flutter or else. You even don't have to think of it...all is handled in the unconscious part of the mind.

Digital.
With a digital recording everything is different. The audio signal is cut into 'pits and lands' and the time domain is handled alongside. The crux is to get them together in the right way nobody can tell they ever were apart.
Now with all the processing on the digital signal errors pop up and mostly they pop up in the time domain. Some 0s and 1s also get lost (or substituted) but the bad digital sound we get from the time domain and hence an incoherent audio signal. Here we have patterns cut out hard and put back in on another time and (maybe) to another frequency. Notice that there is no connection to a frequency in the digital signal (vs. a direct connection to frequency patterns in analog). There is no prefix like a 'Bass-0' or a 'Highs-1'. Some '0s & 1s' belong to a bass note and the others next to them belong to some highs. If you cut them out in a nanoseconds and they are interchanged you get something very unnaturally in a audio signal and the brain is confused by this. It can not put the patterns together again.

One might capture a digital pattern like a hiss in his music and he likes to put it into words but the 'digital hiss' you hear is completely different to the 'analog hiss' you can hear from analog distortions. They are not the same origin in technical terms and the digital one we can't forgive vs. the analog one we can accept because of its naturalness.
The analog hiss might origin in an over saturated signal but it is directly connected in time to the oversaturation else the digital hiss just origins in '0s or 1s' artificially placed in the digital signal by coincidence and hence can not be connected to.

Does this make sense to anyone?

gui