By "commercial level", I assume you mean "quality". 
 
The biggest advantage of a commercial house is the experience of professionals who do this full time and know how to get the most out of the tools they chose to invest in. Big desks have been around for a while, but I don't see them as a requirement when you have unlimited tracks in Sonar.PT was one of the first to support professional requirements (mainly reliability for tracking) but at relatively considerable cost. Times have changed with advances in the cost of technology. There is always a strong tendency to fall back on incumbent "standards" such as ProTools but mostly because it just took less effort to pick something. (Thank you marketing.)
 
All tools require investment to utilize properly. The most important tool is your ears. (Or a professionals which is why I pay somebody for mastering.) 
 
As for "value for money", there is almost no comparison. I work across PT houses, analog only studios (yes they still exist) and Sonar. I kind of feel bad for people starting out on PT because they've been told it's the "professional" way to go only to see them struggle to get up to any level of productivity. I often find myself troubleshooting their rigs for issues that are really making me appreciate Sonar.
 
Don't get caught up in hype regarding gear. Do appreciate the experience of a professional as documented in their references. But do yourself a favor and appreciate the many, many examples of just outstanding performances captured on the simplest of rigs. 
 
 

"Don't get caught up in hype regarding gear. Do appreciate the experience of a professional as documented in their references. But do yourself a favor and appreciate the many, many examples of just outstanding performances captured on the simplest of rigs." 
 
Best advice ever!!!

The engineer was probably seeing the mixer as a system:
 

• Control surface
• Converters
• Audio engine

 
As far as SONAR is concerned, the  audio engine is as good as you can get with today's technology. The converters and control surface are of course external to SONAR. HD has high-quality converters but they are not proprietary parts, so a high-quality interface such as an RME will do an equal or better job.
 
There was a time when I mixed SONAR through a Panasonic DA7 digital mixer. That gave me a control surface but also, the EQs in that mixer ran at double the clock speed and simply sounded better than EQ plug-ins. But that differential became moot years ago.
 
I have nothing against Pro Tools, it works okay. I just find SONAR so much more versatile in so many ways that it fits my needs far better.

The Yamaha stuff makes good hardware.  Protools is good, and got better once they upped the 48 bit depth as John says.  Some of the old upsampling FX sounded better than the native stuff, which is why people spent boocoodles of dollars on it before DAWs started using 64 bits.  And it is funny to hear pros justify their expertise because of hardware.  It is mostly in the ears and the comfort level they have w/ a system of working.  If your mastering engineer feels like he does a better job using what he does, you'll get a better product.  Just don't believe everyone needs to have the same equipment.  Some pros will only track on an old Neve but have to have an SSL to mix for the mix buss.  Some of the best mastering engineers would laugh at mastering on digital, not analog.  Others don't really care about the equipment but put out great material that makes you cry once you hear what they can do on your system.
 
SONAR was one of the first to up the game to 64 bit floating point.  I switched from P5 to SONAR because I could hear a bit of difference (and P5 was a dead end since SONAR started incorporating a lot of P5 tricks) - it was a little smoother.  But it will get as loud as you want, providing you have the DA.

A big digital (so long as you don't have to dive through layers of menus to adjust anything) or analogue desk is more suitable for working in a live PA/sound reinforcement environment, but for handling/mixing recorded audio it has no advantage in principle at all over Sonar, especially if you have a control surface or touch screen.

Live sound engineering is quite different to a studio environment. Live you have to be ready to kill feedback quickly, adjust a mix on the fly and maybe put a series of bands on stage, all requiring a different mix, with no more than a 30 minute gap between them. Recording is a different job with different requirements.

tlw
Live sound engineering is quite different to a studio environment. Live you have to be ready to kill feedback quickly, adjust a mix on the fly and maybe put a series of bands on stage, all requiring a different mix, with no more than a 30 minute gap between them. Recording is a different job with different requirements.

Abolutely! But the OP mentioned taking a project in for mixing, so I don't think it related to live sound.

There seems to be an incredible amount of nonsensical, unsubstantiated claims made by "pros," for instance noted loudmouth "Mixerman's" relentless claims that DAW's cannot sum audio properly without degrading it. And his past claim that ProTools "cannot capture the lowest octave of music." I think there's a lot of gear snobbery, i.e. people emotionally (and aggressively) attached to the gear they've spent years with, in much the same way that chihuahuas become violently defensive of their owners.

The placebo effect comes into it. People kid themselves that their ears are telling them something which cannot possibly be true (or which is beyond the realm of human hearing). For instance the many claims I've read that one DAW "sounds better" than another, and the thread we had a while ago from someone who swore that straight 16th MIDI hi-hats have a groovier feel to them in Cubase (or something). Personally, I can listen to something in the evening and think it sounds better than anything I've ever done, then swear it sounds like crap the following day. So I cannot understand these people who make such deafening proclamations about something which is subjective and/or subject to minute changes in perception.

+1000

There has been some great feed back in this thread!!!

Those Yamaha boards are nothing to scoff at. There is something to be said for integrating any DAW with high quality outboard gear that adds at lot of processing power to your system. You all talk daily about the issues we experience using a PC. Using a desk like that eliminates a large amount of CPU requirements when working on larger track counts. Everything is at your fingertips and you can focus on listening as apposed to staring at a computer screen. 
 
There's nothing downgraded in it's specs compared to any digital desk at that price point. You need to separate Yamaha's high end gear from the consumer equipment. Having owned and used the 01v, NMS 10's and a complete Yamaha PA rig for more than 25 years I'm a little biased. 
My dream recording rig would certainly not turn it's nose up at a smaller version of that desk. 
I would say that guy totally knew what he was doing and carefully chose his gear.