I get this question a lot at
the studio. The analog/digital argument is like the organic food argument. There are two places digital/analog matter; that is the storage mediu; tape or hard drive, and the amplification; tube or solid state. The only place analog/digital is thought to matter now is in the storage medium. At first it mattered whether you used tape or a hard drive because of the need for capacity, but storage is now is big enough, so there isn't that problem. Second is the tube vs solid state. AD/DA converters have improved greatly and as guitarists have noted, digital is not a bad way to go anymore. Tubes take a while to warm up and simulators are sounding more and more like tubes. If you tear apart your equipment, you'll find a lot of digital in there today, even in the "analog" synths. If you're using synths, computers and midi for your instruments in live
performance, you're not going analog. Today everything is going through transformers and capacitors so it is being converted in some way from analog. I would not worry so much. Get an old used spring reverb unit and run that through the effect send/return. Bypassing the digital effect should make verything should sound the way you want to hear it.
Rod Norman
Engineer
