Ian Stirling said:
Mechanical digital has the same advantages that electronic digital has.
You don't need absolute precision in the mechanics, as long as it
works well enough, it'll all work.
With analog, you need parts that fit absolutely, and there is very
little room for error.
I think it might be better to say that with digital, it's pretty easy to
repeatably end up with a machine that -- by construction -- has a known
amount of precision (i.e,. how many bits you gave your digital words). With
analaog, it's pretty easy to repeatably end up with a machine that has some
given (coarse) precision, but typically it's more tempting to push for as
high of precision as possible and that's where everything has to fit so
precisely... (or in the case of analog electronics, you need those really
good op-amps...).
It's interesting to me that the mind seems to be less 'distracted' by
something like low bit rate digital audio with clearly audible compression
artifiacts vs. analog noise found with poor SNR AM/FM.
---Joel Kolstad