Interlude. Can You Hear Analog

In May 2016 Moog began building the 1970 Minimoog Model D again, with the same oscillators and the same filter, and sold it for about three and a half thousand dollars until the stock of parts ran out. In March 2018 the same company released the Minimoog Model D app for iPhone and iPad, and at launch it cost four dollars ninety-nine cents. One manufacturer, one instrument, a price difference of roughly seven hundred times, and the argument over whether you can hear it has been going on among musicians ever since the first software synthesizers appeared.

The oscillator of an analog synthesizer makes sound by charging and discharging a capacitor, and the pitch of that sound is set by transistors and resistors whose properties depend on temperature. While the instrument warms up, the oscillators drift in pitch little by little. Components, moreover, are made with a tolerance, a ten-kilohm resistor can be a few percent more or less, so two identical voices of one synthesizer never sound exactly the same, and neither do two units of the same model. When a chord is played on an analog synthesizer, the three notes diverge from each other ever so slightly and slowly float, and the ear hears a living thickness in this.