Ha ha then allow me to remind you of Sony’s pre-NetMD USB adapter that kinda turned a USB signal into either TOSLink optical or analogue stereo so you could play your files on a computer and record to MD in real time!
Yeah, their software was trash, probably written solely to support ad copy in an attempt to lure MP3 people to MD.
As someone who made mix tapes and wanted all of an album’s B-sides in one place, MD was amazing and I embraced it as a replacement for cassettes. No cassette wobble, hiss, or getting eaten, no LP warp, surface noise, or skipping. It was digital purity in the palm of my hand, and for a while it sounded far better than MP3s.
But LAME got better and better, we started getting more storage and FLAC files and hard drive MP3 jukeboxes like the Rio Karma and Creative Nomad…MDs could not compete no matter how desperate Sony got.
I still love my MD equipment and have hundreds of discs that all still play beautifully. But the format is a historic footnote that (sadly) really did lean into its own obsolescence.
Yeah by the time you add effects, throw that synth into a full mix with other instruments, THEIR effects, and all the compression and EQing in a finished track, the only thing that matters is whether that single instrument adds what it needs to add to the whole.
Objectively, digital oscillators are better - they don’t drift unless you want them to, they stay in tune, and they can always be run through analogue filters to add imperfections (sorry, “warmth”).
But it still boils down to my first point: it’s a single part of a multi-part song. As long as it gets the job done, who cares whether it’s fluctuating voltage or zeroes & ones. It’ll be analogue on its way into the listener’s ear canal either way.