[ben7799]

Does it matter? This is for distortion/noise, like in music.

Nobody using clipping as an effect in their music cares if a fuzz/distortion/overdrive effect is less than pristine from an audiophile standpoint.

Audiophiles would throw up if they realized exactly what's going on in a guitar rig.

[duped]

Yes, it matters a lot. A mild amount of low aliased crunch sounds very different from a mild amount of very aliased distortion, and people pay a bunch of money for software that sounds good.

Audiophiles also drop a lot of money on gear that intentionally distorts the signal. Aliasing is one reason why they buy tube amplifiers instead of tube modelers in their receivers, although I don't doubt the latter exists.

[ben7799]

I play electric guitar.. I really doubt what you're saying.

I'd bet I could ask 10 other people who play guitar and none of them even know what aliasing is.

And none would be able to talk intelligently about what it means and what sounds good when thinking about a transistor distorting, an op-amp distorting, diode or LED clipping, a tube causing clipping/distortion, or a digital algorithm clipping. Most just try something and fiddle with the knobs, decide whether it sounds good or not, and move on with trying to figure out what music to create.

I actually find the stuff that gives more options around clipping tends to just be annoying. I prefer the designer to just pick the best sounding one and just go with that. Pretty much every time I've had an effect that offered a clipping switch or rotary dial one sounds the best, it takes a couple minutes to decide, after that I just wish the designer had left only that best one in the product without a switch.

I'd kind of argue intentional aliasing as a purposeful strategy to get a unique sound is probably something that has been overlooked. I guess "bit crushing" counts and that is somewhat common though.

Audiophiles are a whole different thing. I love tubes for playing guitar where everything is very non-audiophile but it's still really hard to wrap my head around it for audio reproduction.

[samdafi]

I agree with a lot of what you’re saying here. But there are two opposing points: if you doubt that removing aliasing would matter, then you can’t also hold that aliasing on purpose is an overlooked effect idea!

I have been doing tons of anti-aliasing and saturation DSP lately and agree you mostly should be picking a vibe and sticking to it as a DSP sound designer. However the hell that comes together in the math is irrelevant, as long as the minimal set of controls you provide to the musician are fun to tweak and you’re not delivering an airplane cockpit.

There is a lot of marketing blather about analog this legendary that but at the end of the day, a unique sound that is fun for musicians to “play” or intuitively useful for the tradespeople (mixers, mastering engineers, trackers) to use is all that matters!

[duped]

This is something that designers know and care about, and translates into "this box/plugin sounds good" vs "this box/plugin sounds bad" when hearing reviews or asking the dude at guitar center what to try out.

For example, if you were comparing AxeFX, Kemper, or Line6 Pod none of this would be on the labeling, but it's deeply tied to how they were designed.

[ben7799]

For sure and I'd imagine these have to be designed with pretty high sampling rates internally to make sure they don't introduce too many artifacts and sampling issues.

But beyond musicians being able to hear what they like and don't like I don't think anybody understands what is going on. It's quite possible aliasing is part of "sounds digital" when a musician uses that as a pejorative... newer digital processing sounds less digital through better algorithms and likely things like better handling of aliasing.

[Footkerchief]

Most distortion effects aim to add frequencies that are harmonics of the incoming signal. DSP, with a finite sample rate, can add frequencies that are not harmonics of the incoming signal, unless care is taken to avoid this.