why analog electronics

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#analogmatters

"Analogue is the Future" - that's all anyone needs to know.

The universe is analog. Man invented digital.

Except w.r.t. photon counting and femtoamp measurements.

Leopold Kronecker famously said, "God made the integers. All else is the work of man."

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Neurons either fire or they don't - there's no analog in-between.

Sylvia.

Yeah, but single ones rarely have any useful power; it's like a single poster yelling at The Internet.

That said, I imagine there are a few neurons with unusually high "responsibility" for certain tasks, like actions in the motor cortex. That would be a reasonable explanation for why I sometimes get some random tic or twitch when I sleep wrong (usually oversleep, and usually a facial muscle like the eyelid or something).

Also, action potentials sometimes go off half-assed. I don't know if that also half-asses the response that subsequent neurons have to the pulse, or if it only needs to exceed a modest threshold to be useful. Anyway, there's some analog action in there, too; it's all just differential equations arising from chemical concentrations in solution.

Over a human time scale (fractional seconds, rather than milliseconds), it's only meaningful to average over the ensemble, in which case a trillion neurons ticking away looks reasonably continuous for hand-waving's sake.

Tim

I don't think neurons are that dumb. Even a single-cell critter can have complex behavior; a neuron can too.

Could be that "firing" is a tiny part of what's going on. Firing may not even be the main function of a neuron; it's just easy to observe.

Yeast cells don't fire, but they can make beer.

Digital pictures have pixels. Digital audio has been chopped up in one way or the other. Analog is actually real. That is the reason audiophiles are b uying turntables and old vinyl. Even to my s*it ears is sounds better.

Not that I do not appreciate digital, don't get me wrong. Plus I know that even analog is all cut up. When that music was cut on a lathe to make the m aster recording for the beloved vinyl, it was cut up by the bias on the tap e machine. People say that is not quantized because the level is not, but t hat does not change the fact that it has been cut into little pieces.

Actual digitizing has a problem with quiescence. They had to add dither, wh ich is pure noise, to the all digital recordings. Analog recordings convert ed to digital did not need it because of tape hiss or whatever. The distort ion in a digital recording is actually worse at low levels, the opposite of what we were used to.

But the Brat does have a point, and never having hear the sweet sound of an alog, or zoomed in (with a lens) on a picture taken on a real camera might not appreciate that. Digital means you got pixels, and a very similar prosp ect applies to audio as well.

But we are going into a world where there will be no more analog, it is pra ctically inevitable. Is this good or bad ? I cannot really answer that. Tha t is apparently progress, which has made me obsolete. The milleniums don't seem to really care, and the rest of us are dying off. It will be their wor ld and they mostly will not enjoy a picture taken on a real camera or a son g played on a totally analog stereo, like off a turntable. No class D or an y of that s*it, and they will not care.

So what ? They do not care. Most of their car stereos are better than what we had in the old days, and car stereos might become a thing of the past as they wear those earbuds n s*it.

Truth is I enjoy the hell out of getting out my Dual turntable and spinning some vinyl on it, feed my Phase Linear but the fact is that is a total PIT A. I would rather just play it off my PC, and I got better copies than they give you on youtube.

You don't have to handle the vinyl, or load a tape which is vulnerable to m agnetic field and whatever else.

But the sound is great. Most of the young today have never heard a turntabl e. Those who have have said "Damn that sounds great". I have read that more than once on audio fora.

One of the things people do not get is that a CD, most of the soundcards in your PCs and whatever are strictly limited to 20 KHz. Vinyl and tape is no t.

Electronics can roughly be divided into two areas. The transfer of power/e nergy and the transfer and processing of information. Digital has complete ly won in the transfer of information but it is still analog in the transfe r of power/energy. Power and energy include power supply design (need an i nductor/ transformer or linear device) and RF which transfers power over lo ng distances and also the whole power grid is essentially analog.

Analog or digital are both electronic so both will eventually fail.

boB

Bloody mathematicians :)

Oh no! There we go again.

Jeroen Belleman

Firing rate and other aspects carry critical neural 'analog' information.

If it only was so harmless!

St. Augustine, magister ecclesiae:

"The good Christian should beware the mathematician and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of hell."

regards, Gerhard