Justification for expensive outboard gear? Opinions...

[licendrivr]

Ok, so I'd like opinions of whether folks think buying outboard gear is clearly necessary in today's time...

Particularly analog EQ for example: With some pretty fine plug-in EQ's available for a few hundred dollars, can one justify buying a single channel tube EQ for a few thousand dollars? Before you jump down my throat, please don't get me wrong:

1. This is not an analog vs. digital war
2. This is not a convenience of recall driven post

Here's what I'm thinking: While I'm not doubting the analog EQ smokes the plug-in, it's only a single channel, while plug-ins can have as many instances as your CPU can handle. Is the 1 chn analog EQ really 10x the value? Will being able to use that EQ make that few thousand dollars worth the purchase?

If you're a million dollar studio, by all means, buy 15 tube outboard EQ's, and the results will be phenominal. For your home/project studio owner, I don't know.....

Thoughts anyone?

[jason]

Originally posted by licendrivr
Ok, so I'd like opinions of whether folks think buying outboard gear is clearly necessary in today's time...

NO.

I'm sure there are records on the charts right now mixed in the box that weren't tracked with much outboard eq.....

On the other hand I love outboard gear, and would hate to do a record without it. I probably wouldn't like how my records sounded without it....

With a limited gear budget, I'm sure dig stuff could get the job done.

[joeq]

If you are not afraid to commit to a sound, you can use your lone analog EQ across every channel that you overdub. Anything you miss can be "reamped" thru it and the effect printed. PITA? sure.

Worth it? well that depends...

Plug in, or hardware, "Ten times the value" means nothing if you can't get what you want/need from something. A bus is cheaper than a taxi, but if the bus doesn't go where you want, it doesn't matter how cheap it is.

[Rick Sutton]

I find that analog gear does something that plug ins not only can't do as well but just can't do at all. For lack of a better term, I'll call it "non-linearities". Maybe it's because I was raised in an era when "non-linearities" (henceforth referred to as NL) were so thick in recordings that they were actively battled with by the engineer to eliminate them, that I find recordings without them to be boring and sterile. With analog outboard, NL is part of the process and, not unlike the wood used in building a guitar, becomes an integral part of the final sound.
The digital emulation (plug in) seems to be able to mimic the linear parts of the analog process but completely misses the NL inherant in all outboard analog signal processors. I personally find this lack of NL in digital processing to be too great of a loss to compare the two as "the same thing". Likewise, I prefer an acoustic guitar made of fine wood rather than one made of plastic even though they may both have identical "specifications". In fact, the parallel
is very appropriate in my mind as I would rather spend several thousand dollars on one wooden guitar rather than have several dozen instances of plastic guitars. I'm sure it can be argued that some people can't hear the difference. But many people can.
To sum it up, I find that in sound production,"perfection" to be boring and revel in the sound of "imperfection" where there is endless variety in tonality and texture.
This basic difference between outboard eq's, compressors etc. and the plug-in equivilant is why I find the price differential to be acceptable.

[natpub]

depends

[robmix]

A very wise engineer once told me that recording is a game of inches and that even inches eventually add up to a mile. In other words, as engineers it's our job to fight for every last bit of quality that we can. I think you'll find that tracking with high class outboard leads to less "fixing in the mix" type problems. Remember crap in equals crap out.



Rob