![]() While both approaches can yield satisfactory results in many cases, there is still room for improvement in the sound quality and model adjustability, if the virtual analog models are to act as substitutes for the original analog devices. In the white-box approach, the designer first studies the operation logic of the device (often from the circuit schematics) and tries to design the model so that it also simulates the internal operation of the target. In the former, the designer treats the original audio device (called target in the following) as an unknown system and tries to design the model so that it mimics only the input/output relationship of the target, without trying to simulate its internal state. There are roughly two methodological approaches for designing virtual analog models: the black-box- and the white-box methods. Guitar tube amplifier emulation has been an especially vibrant area of research with several commercial products. Since the 1990s, there has been a strong trend in the digital audio effects community towards virtual analog modeling, that is, mimicking the sound of old analog audio devices using digital signal processing (DSP). This freely available software is written in Matlab language, but the analysis tool can also run as a standalone program, so the user does not need to have Matlab installed in order to perform the analysis. A comparison between a well-known guitar tube amplifier and two commercial software simulations is presented as a case study. This paper offers a remedy by introducing a new software tool for easy analysis of distorting effects. Furthermore, although there do exist separate algorithms for nonlinear distortion analysis, there is currently no unified, easy-to-use tool for rapid analysis of distorting audio systems. While traditional system analysis tools such as the frequency response give detailed information on the operation of linear and time-invariant systems, they are less useful for analyzing nonlinear devices. When creating virtual analog models of nonlinearly distorting devices, it would be very useful to carefully analyze the type of distortion, so that the model could be made as realistic as possible. Several audio effects devices deliberately add nonlinear distortion to the processed signal in order to create a desired sound. ![]()
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