[dharma1]

I've got a bunch of friends who have worked on this at some point, and I know some of the people cited in that PhD thesis. I can still hear the difference, even with state-of-the art current virtual analog emulations, like Diva.

Have to say the gap is narrowing though.

One approach I haven't seen used yet is using the latest AI/neural networks to learn and model the inherent nonlinearities in analog audio

[ShinyCyril]

I wish I had picked that for my masters dissertation - ML + DSP seems like a really interesting area!