Stereo Acoustics, What is Phase (in phase, out)?

[steve]

Digital kind of sucks.

unless you use it correctly

the same reasoning why clipping/overdriving does not work with digital

The problem clipping / overdriving with digital audio is that it can cause aliasing distortion in addition to the clipping / overdrive distortion. The solution is to ensure that clipping is not entirely "hard", and to oversample. Hard clipping will create an infinite number of harmonics, whereas soft clipping produces a limited number. The harder the clipping the more harmonics, but as long as the clipping is not entirely hard the number will be finite. Provided that you oversample enough to avoid aliasing distortion, then there is no reason why digital distortion should not be as "good" as analog. Of course, if you want analog noise in there as well then you will need to add it because digital amplification does not add noise.

or some analog generated echo

In the days before digital delay / digital echo, we had "bucket brigade" delay and "tape echo". Sure they could be used "creatively", but the actual sound quality was crap by modern standards