Seeking advice:MAJOR upgrade f/cheap sound card to the warmest reggae/hip hop/vintage

[Roman]

I am going to be buying 2 Apogee Ensemble's. This should be an improvement on my M-Audio Delta sound card.
I want to feed the Apogee's a warmed up sound. Preferably a colouring/distortion that can be tweaked with the amount of drive or colouring type.
I have 8 outs on my Akai Z8 sampler that I use alot live into Logic. So colouring these before the Apogees and any other MIDI sounds, Mic, guitars is my goal. I just imagine that using somme analogue hardware for colouring would be better than using plug ins.
I like warmer vintage sounding music. Ideally I could have the sound of a fat tape machine coming out of my DAW.
Ok, so after I am feeding warmed sounds into my Apogees do I really need to have an expensive summing box instead of bouncing ITB. I know this topic has been discussed before. I geuss I just need advice with a perspective on where I am with gear and analogue summing might just be diminishing returns.
My set up:
Logic/Mac G5
M-Audio sound card
UAD-1
TLM103 into Focusrite Voicemaster
Trinity Rack
Nord Lead 2
Mackie 1604VLZ
Mackie Control Universal
Guitars, Turntable etc.
MPC60II triggering an Akai Z8.
Korg MS20.

I like to compose with all my MIDI sound sources inputting live into Logic for eq and reverb etc.
Ideally I would be able to process 16 channels through some classy neve warming device that was rack mounted.

[Shaolin]

Hey Roman

Sorry there's no way I was going to finish reading your braindump...

But reading parts of it you seem to want all the answers right now and an ideal studio setup at once. Without making any mistakes. Or learning from the limitations of affordable gear. Or wondering what something more high end would do to your sound whil struggling to get the best out of what you have (3630 excluded of course)

Maybe I missed your point somewhere in chapter 12....

[Roman]

I edited my last longer post and made it a bit more to the point.
Maybe my question is too broad.

[Kiwiburger]

Depends how much money you've got. I would suggest that you buy a hi end two channel compressor, and record your synths two channels at a time. That's the advantage of midi - unlimited playback of your performances. Midi timing should be better if you break up the load.

Do you want creative distortion? Or compression? Or eq? Or phase smearing? What are you expecting to get - the word warmth is meaningless. One man's warmth is another man's mud.

You could probably buy some good mono compressors too - I expect a lot of the parts you track would be best in mono. If you use stereo voices, you can't really track left and right in seperate takes. That's because midi isn't sample accurate timing, and free-running LFO's like chorus etc would be totally out of sync each take. You could record a stereo track, and that would lock in the phase relationship and you could then process left & right seperately - but that's probably too big a hassle.

Which is why I would look at some stereo compressors, or pairs of good mono compressors.

If I was looking to do this, I would probably be looking closely at a pair of Chandler Germainium Compressors. Plenty to choose from. The RNC and RNLA are worth a look at, especially since they have unbalanced i/o.

Then again, there are advantages to using DI boxes. I find unbalanced cables are a huge source of hum and problems, so I use Radial JDI passive transformer DI's so I can run balanced cables. The transformers take the edge of digital sounds. Maybe you should look at a Radial JDI Duplex first up.

[Roman]

I am just gonna be really ignorant and buy some stuff. Ok the 2 Apogee Ensembles is decided.
I am in the mindstate of warming stuff up on the way in so I'm gonna get these for options to track through:
Portico 5042 tape sim
Anamod ATS-1
Fatso
Thermionic Culture Vulture

And I'm going to sum my mixes out the 16 Ensemble outs into a Neve 8816 and bounce to a professional 2 track tape machine.
With those tape emulation tools at least I can compose and mix with warmed up sounds and not have to wait till I bounce to the 2 track.
When I track drums (I haven't recorded drums before) I will use these tools to try to sound like a fat 70's drum sound that went to tape.
I'm an engineering beginner when it comes to recording drums. I've been just doing rap/rnb songs with MIDI instrumentals.
Now I want to do live stuff that sounds like 70's tape recordings.
I read about ribbon mics being recommended for warm recordings. I'm gonna use my TLM103, a thomann ribbon mic etc and just experiment until it's good.