AW: Analog DIY versus Digital DIY

[Haible Juergen]

Well, my bias towards analogue is well known, so just let me add one point,
that you might or might not find surprising:

	> Do you like to work with your hands?  Soldering and part assembly
are
	> physical processes.  Some people enjoy that and others do not. 

The strange thing is that I usually do *not* enjoy working with my hands.
You know I am the guy who doesn't like garden work, and who is really
helpless when his car produces strange noises. (;->)
All this soldering and breadboarding is just a means to get these circuits 
to work, for me. What I really enjoy is the circuit design that happens
*before*
building anything. Lots of hand scribbled partial schematics, optimizing by
crumling up one sheet of paper and starting a new drawing ... that's the
best part for me. Especially with a pot of Green Tea and a good music
in the background, I can spend hours on that part. My dream would be
that I had a few people who'd do the soldering and mechanical work
afterwards. (;->)
BTW, I have built 90% or more of my JH-3 Modular without breadboarding
or veroboard. Circuit design, a little Spice simulation, PCB design.
The projects that came later were different, and my recent stuff is all on
veroboard. But I always have a rather long conception phase, and can't
wait to get past the building phase. 

Now, the initial question was about a beginner. I also vote for analogue
here.
The greatest motivation to learn something is when you come to good results
at an early stage. You can build circuits that produce weird noises from a
couple
of transistors, and you can go on to build processing devices like guitar
stomp
box circuits quite early, and you get rewarding results very soon.
I never was so motivated to build digital stuff. A complicated DSP algorithm
may be comparable to a large analogue modular both in complexity and in
the resulting fun to play with it, but what about the small beginner's
projects?


JH.