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The most common cause of thin, edgy digital sound is recording too hot. The cheaper the gear, the more frequently this is a problem because cheap gear often has an inadequate power supply. If all the power in the sound has been lost because a cheap power supply ran out of current, no amount of additional processing is going to make things better.
Probably the biggest difference found in older pro gear is the power supplies and the amount of analog headroom available. The old tube boards had over 20 dB more headroom than some current solid state designs. At +4 average levels, we were nowhere near saturating the transformers and preamps. Likewise in most cases tape machines were not being pushed.
There's no reason to record 24 bit audio peaking any higher than -10 and peaking at -20 is less of a problem than peaking at zero. Recording with comparable headroom to older recordings yields lots closer sounding results than any kid of post recording processing I've heard.
And it doesn't cost you a dime!
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