I'm not sure you understand what we're talking about. You seem to be talking about analog electronics, where I'm talking about computation with mechanical or electrical analogs of physical systems.
Both domains are extremely well understood. Analog electronics is an incredibly deep field, and forms the foundations of basically all of our electronic infrastructure. For instance, the transceivers that power cell stations are all analog and are incredibly complex. This stuff would seem like alien magic to anyone from even 30 years ago. The sheer magnitude of complexity in modern analog circuits cannot be overstated.
As for analog computing, well, it's just math. We can design analog computers as complex as our understanding of the physics of the system we want to model. There's not really any magic here. If we can express a physical system in equations, we can "simply" build a machine that computes that equation.
> I have yet to actually hear any digital music yet ... that didn't have to pass through a DtoA converter.
This is simply not true. There are plenty of ways to turn a digital signal into sound without an intermediate analog stage. See PC speakers, piezo buzzers, the floppotron. You can also just pump a square wave directly into a speaker and get different tones by modulating the pulse width.
The reason we use an intermediate analog stage for audio is because direct digital drive sounds like total trash. I won't go too much into it, but physics means that you can't reproduce a large range of frequencies, and you will always get high frequency noise that sounds like static.
Edit: I didn't notice your username before. All 8 bit systems make heavy use of the square wave voice, which is a digital signal. But it's typically passed through an analog filter to make it sound less bad. Music on e.g., the first IBM PCs was purely digital, played through a piezo beeper on the motherboard.
Both domains are extremely well understood. Analog electronics is an incredibly deep field, and forms the foundations of basically all of our electronic infrastructure. For instance, the transceivers that power cell stations are all analog and are incredibly complex. This stuff would seem like alien magic to anyone from even 30 years ago. The sheer magnitude of complexity in modern analog circuits cannot be overstated.
As for analog computing, well, it's just math. We can design analog computers as complex as our understanding of the physics of the system we want to model. There's not really any magic here. If we can express a physical system in equations, we can "simply" build a machine that computes that equation.
> I have yet to actually hear any digital music yet ... that didn't have to pass through a DtoA converter.
This is simply not true. There are plenty of ways to turn a digital signal into sound without an intermediate analog stage. See PC speakers, piezo buzzers, the floppotron. You can also just pump a square wave directly into a speaker and get different tones by modulating the pulse width.
The reason we use an intermediate analog stage for audio is because direct digital drive sounds like total trash. I won't go too much into it, but physics means that you can't reproduce a large range of frequencies, and you will always get high frequency noise that sounds like static.
Edit: I didn't notice your username before. All 8 bit systems make heavy use of the square wave voice, which is a digital signal. But it's typically passed through an analog filter to make it sound less bad. Music on e.g., the first IBM PCs was purely digital, played through a piezo beeper on the motherboard.