> Analog aids merely amplify existing sound—a more sophisticated version of an ear trumpet—such that there is no real interruption of the original acoustic wave

> Analog aids merely amplify existing sound—a more sophisticated version of an ear trumpet—such that there is no real interruption of the original acoustic wave. Digital aids, by contrast, pick up the sound, process it into binary digital information, and then reproduce the sound as a new wave using a built-in digital-to-analog converter. Digital devices thus have to re-create the activity that our brains and ears co-evolved for eons to perform. It is hubris to think that a few decades of research and development might not fall short. Why do writers so often accuse experts of "hubris" while arguing that their own poorly informed opinion is superior to the well-informed opinion of said experts? That said, most digital systems don't make it easy (certainly not easy enough to be relevant to a casual user) to obtain the many noise / filtering / distortion effects you get with an analog setup, and that's a legitimate complaint. While the audiophile scene is rife with placebo effects and woo, I've long wondered if some UX lessons couldn't be salvaged. Could hiss+pop+lowpass+distortion+hardware_pickiness settings be packaged into a form that would make people willing to consume them in a digital context?