Today's music production may be IT-based (and it should be), but anyone who has ever dealt with it knows that software doesn't sound as full and deep as hardware and this is not about to change.
I've spent a lot of time over the years trying to get the sound from my DAW to sound like hardware, but it was a waste of time, I never could get that sound. I checked many books about mixing and mastering, but the answer wasn't there... I read all the crazy stuff, I knew about Nyquist and limits of sampling frequencies, I knew about oversampling, volterra kernels, harmonic distortion of several orders, I was familiar with Fletcher–Munson curves or equal-loudness contours, and I learned a lot of technical stuff, but it didn't help. There was something missing.
I was aware of how many professionals use software synths and effects and I started to realize that the difference between me and them is that they mix their tracks on huge hardware consoles and then send them for processing to mastering engineers with tens of thousands of dollars worth of outboard equipment, so eventually I decided that someday I'll build up my own analog rig and will process my mixes with hardware.
But it took me years to realize what kind of hardware I really need and what I don't.
