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+1. There's no way one can build a fully digital audio system; the signal is analog when it is produced and is going to return analog before reaching our ears.

+1. There's no way one can build a fully digital audio system; the signal is analog when it is produced and is going to return analog before reaching our ears. Also I don't see analog/digital as mutually exclusive; they're two worlds that very often work together benefiting from the technology of their time; digital chips displaced very soon analog ones in calculators because we didn't and still don't have the technology for example to build ideal or very close to ideal opamps and other parts, but should we one day reach that point, it would be a game changer: as an example, the number of transistors needed for calculating a square root in a couple opamps would then be two orders of magnitude smaller than the simplest processor, not to mention no digital quantization, no clock needed, virtually no delay and way less power consumption. I'm not saying that we could build a analog computer running Doom, in all honesty I can't even imagine how it could do that without involving something digital, but maybe swapping more elements of a digital system with analog ones might be doable one day to get the best of both worlds.

CamperBob2 4y ago
Remember why ECL lost the battle for the fastest semiconductor process family, though. ECL was several times faster than CMOS for many years, but CMOS's inherent scalability meant that it was profitable to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at improving it. So there was only a narrow window in time when ECL designers like Cray had the upper hand. Once ECL lost the high ground in performance, it was gone forever. You won't encounter it outside of computer museums today, except in very specialized applications. Analog computing is like that, only even more doomed. It doesn't scale. I do think we'll get back to analog eventually, for the same reason our brains aren't digital. But that will look like alien technology compared to what we have now, so there's no near-term incentive to explore it. Right idea, wrong timeframe, probably by a hundred years or more.

CamperBob2 4y ago

Remember why ECL lost the battle for the fastest semiconductor process family, though. ECL was several times faster than CMOS for many years, but CMOS's inherent scalability meant that it was profitable to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at improving it. So there was only a narrow window in time when ECL designers like Cray had the upper hand. Once ECL lost the high ground in performance, it was gone forever. You won't encounter it outside of computer museums today, except in very specialized applications. Analog computing is like that, only even more doomed. It doesn't scale. I do think we'll get back to analog eventually, for the same reason our brains aren't digital. But that will look like alien technology compared to what we have now, so there's no near-term incentive to explore it. Right idea, wrong timeframe, probably by a hundred years or more.