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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

Analog computing sucks. It's inherently sensitive to noise and random variation in your devices that's basically ubiquitous with modern chip-making processes. Digital electronics actively reject noise at every step in a computation, albeit at the cost of wasting energy in the process. With analog, a more complex computation becomes exponentially harder.

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There are forms of analogue computing beyond solving DEs with circuit theory. One of the more esoteric examples I'd heard of was using DNA microarrays for massively parallel SAT solvers: combinatorically generate a very large number of different, long single-strands of DNA using clever chemistry, flow over short pieces of DNA that encode your problem that are flourescently labelled, and then "simply" read off the result. Being able to use the fact that Avogadro's number is absolutely massive is a big speed-up for some particularly nasty NP-hard problems where you want to brute force it.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/35003155

One of the potentially large applications for optical analog computing is for training neural networks, which is an application where noise is a feature and is tolerable. People are already using noise (and low precision) intentionally for regularization and also doing things like intentionally not synchronizing GPU kernels for performance, which causes the inputs for the next round to be in a potentially random state when read, and noticing that the regularization side effects on the network are positive.

> inherently sensitive to noise and random variation in your devices

What is a drawback to most, can be a benefit for others.

Many like listening to LPs not because the quality is superior, but because the quality is worse.

What if randomness is desirable? What if volume of signals to process is so humongous, some (controlled) noise is actually beneficial? Analog computing sucks at processing digital signals, the same way digital sucks at finely approaching the analog domain. Even at light-speeds there's only so much a bunch of zeroes-and-ones can do.

> It's inherently sensitive to noise and random variation

Musicians often like old analog equipment because it creates unexpected sounds and sparks ideas (pun partially intended), and may have a nostalgic feel that's hard to emulate in digital. Maybe digital equipment can have randomness algorithms, but they probably have a learning curve.

Analog computers are like LP records: only good for nostalgia.

Depth of sound, long term storage, ease of navigation, there are lots of reasons people prefer vinyl that aren't based in nostalgia.

Depth? You mean like a large range in available amplitudes (loud vs soft)?

Probably, and they're wrong.

No DRM and the fact that you actually own it is a big plus.

Like a CD?

Or an mp3, ogg, wav, flac

What do you mean by depth of sound? A vinyl record has a dynamic range of around 70db, where as a CD has a dynamic range of up to 144db, though in practice it is usually only 90-96db. Either way you shake that stick though, digital audio (uncompressed) has a much deeper sound.

Even in the recording studio back in the days of vinyl pressings all ran on studio grade magnetic tape with a higher dynamic range (not by much, albeit), but the sound that the artist was going for was typically hindered by analog recording media in a way that isn't true today.

Often vinyl records are much more carefully mastered when compared to their CD counterparts. Many of us are survivors of the loudness wars. https://www.yoursoundmatters.com/vinyl-vs-cd-in-the-loudness...

Ugh, this frustrates me. You are just saying that the _mix_ put on vinyl is better than the mix put on CD. That same mix put on CD would be even better due to higher fidelity of the format. Vinyl is a strictly worse format... unfortunately it's also an easier source of better mixes.

Not a vinyl purist, but the argument is that the same mix sounds different pressed into vinyl vs burned to disc because they reproduce the frequencies differently when read. You would have to engineer the CD mix differently to match the sound of the vinyl.

I mean... So you can't record high frequencies on vinyl... if you WANTED the CD to sound like vinyl you could intentionally alias the high frequencies. But why would you want to do that?

It's not really a case of them "producing different frequencies when read." It's that CDs are capable of recording and reproducing a broader range of frequencies than vinyl.

That's backwards. You mix, and then master to your format. When you master to vinyl, you inherently lose data because the needle will pop off the track if it's too loud or there's too much bass. You literally don't have to do anything like that when you master for digital. You just make it sound good and you're done.

I believe I read that when mixing for vinyl they presume higher grade speakers than those of CD owners so they optimise for the assumed audio setup of the format buyers.

Which is a shame for me since I have a entry-level-audiophile setup and just stream and have little desire in getting into vinyl.

That's false.

Hope you aren't playing those records on un-conditioned cables.

Fuck no. Vinyl is inferior to modern digital media in every single measurable way. I cannot believe this myth won't fucking die! You literally have to roll off the low end in a vinyl master so the needle doesn't pop off the track ffs. Not to mention the vinyl literally wears down every time you play the record.

LPs are really bad at "long term storage".

You can read them without damaging them slightly. You can't make a perfect copy, so when the vinyl detoriates, you will not be able to "make a fresh copy".

CDs can be copied perfectly and can be moved to superior tech, e.g. SSD. You can continue copying a digital version for the next 1000 years without any loss.

Sounds a lot like "quantum computing".

Quantum computing is digital (with error correction), not analog. Analog computing can not scale *in principle*. Quantum computing can theoretically scale (it is not forbidden by the laws of Nature like it is for analog computing), it is just engineeringly "difficult".

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