Analog or Digital?

[GuitarLord5000]

I've been curious for some time now, and maybe some of you guys can answer this for me.  What part(s) in a stompbox make your signal analog or digital?  I've been playing guitar for about 15 years now, and I've played through effects that claim to be analog as well as digital.  In most circumstances, I like the sound from analog effects better.  (There ARE some digital effects I like better, but they are few and far between.)  I'm just kinda curious what components make the A/D distinction.

[Hal]

normally, your signal is analog.  If you use a a/d converter, it becomes digital.  then you can use DSP or whatever.  after that, you use a d/a converter to make it analog again (and useful by other effects/your amp)

[petemoore]

Digital effects have A/D then D/a conversion. they take the input signal , turn that into a digital code only the 'machine knows, that's the A/D part...
 Then the processor [of some kind...bigger is usually better] distorts, echoes, choruses, eq's etc [whatever functions the unit has] this digital rendering of input signal.
 Then the processed Digital signal is converted to an analog output...[you're amp would sound like crackles only I would think if you dumped a digital code in it] the D/A part.
 I use a Reverb Echo and a Proverb, other than that I'm not fond of them.
 I had exp with an RP100, quite good for certain aspects [you might do worse with a first 100$ purchase], I fought with it in a live situation for a while...dead gaps [no sound] during efkt changes, actually shortchanged the rest of my setup big time, in many ways.
 It's whatever works. Someone typed recently "the general consensus is that digital echoes [that would include reverb in my case] are OK. but other than that...which I pretty much agree with, but would add the more expensive echo types [tape and analog] are probably like real cool...I don't know that I have tried analog echo, but I can say tape echoes are super cool, only when they work right, are expensive, troublesome etc. and take alot of maintanence.
 Reverb echoes [and all digital efkts] but expecially reverbs and echoes, are wayy cheep or inexpensive compared to their counterparts [or should be]. I personally don't like the way any of the ones I've seen are constructed. My RP's power jack haff  broke [intermittent] which meant a reboot/reset after every momentary lapse of power, which could be caused by resetting it dohh. Basic POC.
 IIRC the low volume crunch sustain was acceptably cool, combined with other efkts [chorus flange and etc were cheese IMO] could be cool with headphones. For getting an amp cranking though these OD's and Fuzzes here are about 1000.007% "better", basically I don't think it's that tuff to get most of what a digital thing can do [getting all of them would be alot, but I only used certain ones] obviously they would sound different. Getting it all into a small package like that would be another matter entirely.
 I try to stick to stricktly analog, however the ease of using the Boss RV-3 or the Proverb is why I use them.

[Peter Snowberg]

I think it's important to remember that just like analog can be done poorly, so can digital. Thanks to the imperfectness of the physical world, you can actually do just about anything in digital better than it can be done in analog including things that analog just can't ever do. The flip side is that in order to do that, you need to throw a ton of hardware at it, which gets expensive. Most digital gear is "good enough" to sell it into the market it's designed for.

Above I said "just about anything"....

I feel the big exception to this rule is tube distortion. Once you get plasma involved in the equation, digital emulation may go out the window. In any case it takes more computing power than any rack effects unit has these days to make a serious plasma emulation IMHO. The fact that the U.S. Govt. has supercomputers that can model thermonuclear reactions confirms that it can be done as long as there is no unforeseen interaction with the plasma, but now I'm on the fringe of being hippy-dippy. How's your tube amp karma?

Take care,
-Peter

[Mark Hammer]

In some instances, you can have hybrids with what for all intents and purposes is an analog signal path.  The digital part is in the signal routing and the application of settings.  Bear in mind there is a large variety of digitally-controlled pots and attenuators on the market.  Programming settings involves storing them and applying the digital code to something that easily reconfigures in response to the code.
Additionally, one can imagine that many types of modulation can be performed digitally without having any differential impact on the analog signal being modulated.  If one is varying signal level with a photocell, that photocell doesn't really care if the modulation source is analog or digitally generated.  PIC or 2-op-amp LFO makes no difference.