On 2/10/2019 12:28 AM, James Price wrote:
What's the differentiating factor between digital clipping at the input stage, and its effect on the end result, compared to how an analog guitar amplifier sounds when boosted?
The input stage of a guitar amplifier is always analog, so if there's
clipping at the input stage, it's "analog clipping." The
analog-to-digital converter will reproduce the clipping very accurately.
To refine the question, if I'm recording guitar using a digital amp / guitar cab simulator into a DAW and the input of the guitar is clipping, how does that clipping affect the digital amp / cab and what's the end result at the output end (after the amp / cab) compared to an analog amplifier with huge amounts of input boost?
A properly designed digital system will accommodate (and properly
digitize) a signal with the maximum output level of the analog input
stage. The maximum output level of the input stage is the point at which
clipping begins.
It's not completely clear what you're asking about, though. If you have
a guitar amplifier with a standard input jack, internal digital
processing, a power amplifier, and a loudspeaker, it will work just like
a straight-through analog amplifier. But I have a sense that this isn't
what you're talking about.
So if you have a computer audio interface ("sound card") that has an
input for a guitar, that's connected to your computer, and you have an
amplifier and speaker plug-in inserted on a track in your DAW that
you're using to process the guitar signal. You can crank up the guitar
output and the input gain on the interface so that you get analog
clipping going into the digital guts of the interface. That's the sound
that will be feeding the plug-in. If you keep the gain down so that the
interface's input stage isn't clipping, then the plug-in will be getting
a clean signal and you can use its controls to bugger it up however you
want.
Unless you have an interface that's specifically designed to be used
with a guitar (a few of them showed up at the NAMM show last month), you
shouldn't expect the guitar input of your interface to distort in the
same way as the input of a real amplifier, and the kind of distortion
that you get from pushing the output stage of an amplifier hard is what
will be simulated by the plug-in. They're pretty flexible so you can get
a lot more different sound colors from the same input signal than you
can from most amplifiers.
You just have to play around to get the sound that you like, but because
you have more tools, it will take more time than just plugging in and
playing. But you can do that, too, with a digital system, once you get
the hang of it.
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