I personally don't believe that a plugin will ever reach the level, 
sound wise, of outboard gear.  There is something about the actual
electron/chaos theory/hooked to a box magic that I just don't believe
can be "modeled" in a software algorithm...but they'll get close...
where this is really evident is in Amp Sims...they're nice...but still
not the same as  "real mic'd Guitar and Amp" set up...

Outboard gear is not going away any time soon...not for the "Big Boyz"...
and they wouldn't charge $50 for a plugin and $5,000 for the "real thing"
if they could "get the same sound" out of the plugin...there's more then just
an "enigma" there to me....YMMV
 

I use my hardware compressor.

cclarry
I personally don't believe that a plugin will ever reach the level, 
sound wise, of outboard gear.  There is something about the actual
electron/chaos theory/hooked to a box magic that I just don't believe
can be "modeled" in a software algorithm...but they'll get close...
where this is really evident is in Amp Sims...they're nice...but still
not the same as  "real mic'd Guitar and Amp" set up...

Outboard gear is not going away any time soon...not for the "Big Boyz"...
and they wouldn't charge $50 for a plugin and $5,000 for the "real thing"
if they could "get the same sound" out of the plugin...there's more then just
an "enigma" there to me....YMMV

No enigma at all.

Making hardware means designing a circuit, constructing a prototype, testing it and repeatedly tweaking it.

Then buying in the components to make the finalised release version of the device, getting the enclosure made and printed, hours of labour to make each unit, space to stockpile it, distribution arrangements to sell it with what the distributor will pay being a key factor if whether something can be profitably made or not. Add shipping costs, warranty repair costs, tooling costs for the production line and probably lots I've forgotten.

Followed by continually monitoring component suppliers to check what they sell today is the same as what they sold you yesterday.

Software plugin.
Analyse unit you want to model. Develop the virtual equivalent and fine-tune it.

Then sell direct through your website. No additional construction costs/unit because there are no incremental costs involved increating a copy of digital data. No storage or shipping costs, no deal with distributors required so you can sell direct at the same price you'd accept from a distributor for something that involves near-zero costs beyond development. No components to buy in, no machinery to hire or buy. The cost of making one copy of a plugin and a million copies is so close it's pocket change.

Make the price too high and you lose money, or make less than you would by selling at a lower price which generates far more sales.

It's no different to selling a CD versus selling downloads of music. One way means paying for maybe millions of CDs, the other doesn't. And someone might spend $50 on impulse or just to find out what the plugin is like. Very few people will pay $500 for those reasons, and still fewer pay $5,000.

As for software modelling vs. hardware, my answer to that is "it depends."

And man will never fly, the moon landing was faked, and any talk of some tiny "super device" that a person can carry in their pocket which will not only connect them to a world wide communications network, but the Computing power of which will dwarf that of the room filling boxes that were used during said moon landing by orders of magnitude, and will also shoot excellent photos and acceptable video AND house most all the music one would care to listen to is just childish fantasy talk.

Just sayin.

The world has never had a shortage of Luddites who swore that X or Y could never be done. And then it was.

Just imagine the day when all compressors, Eq's Reverbs. Delay's etc. and all instruments are modeled precisely and all we need to do is select the modeled instrument and click in midi notes to create our musical masterpiece. Then, insert that precisely modeled Eq, compressor, Delay and Reverb and send it off to that magical cloud for all the world to listen to. Maybe once in a while make a visit to the museum where all those Useless old instruments and hardware consoles and things are now displayed. Yes they were cool in their day.
 
 

Why would it be hard to believe? There's nothing magic about hardware, it is just another way of accomplishing things. So if you have software that can do what you want, that is often advantageous since it is easier to use.
 
It is true that you can't do a "perfect" emulation of a piece of analogue hardware because at this point it is far too CPU intensive to do a real circuit simulation with full propagation delays and so on in realtime. However that doesn't matter because you may be able to work out how to model it in other ways such that it sounds precisely the same, as in nulls in an inverse test.
 
But even that caveat only applies if you are trying to model analogue hardware. If the hardware is digital, then it can, by the very definition of a Turing Machine, be perfectly emulated on any other Turing complete processor. Digital "hardware" is just software. It is a CPU, FPGA or ASIC of some variety running code of some variety. That can all be made to run on your CPU in your desktop just fine. Easy to do in realtime as well, since Intel desktop CPUs are crushingly powerful compared to the stuff they stick in outboard gear. So the only reason why there are things you can get in dedicated hardware but not on the PC of that type are because companies choose to keep it exclusive. It could be implemented as software, if they wanted to since it literally IS software, just on a different platform.
 
Now talking about old analogue gear again, there's the issue that with software we can actually do BETTER for nearly everything. There are very real limitations in the analogue world that we just don't face in the digital world. So we can, and do, make things that are far superior. Like just take the basic mixer built in to every DAW. No analogue device, no matter how perfect, could ever come near to the perfection offered by a digital mixer. No distortion, noise below anything you can create, massive amounts of headroom, etc, etc. It is the pinnacle of transparency. Or limiters that can actually "look in to the future" and react prior to level changes. Or equalizers that maintain perfect phase linearity. We can and do make digital tools that cannot exist in the analogue world.
 
I'm not trying to bash analogue hardware, some of it gives a unique and desirable sound, but I think people worship it like magic too much. The question is getting what you want and often software can do that easier, and better, than hardware.

I disagree..there IS magic in hardware...

Just like, no matter how hard they've tried, they
just can't seem to get "real tube" sound...they 
are getting better at it...but not "There" yet...

The magic is in electrons flowing through wires and 
circuits and Diaphragms and etc...into a multi-thousand 
dollar console and then, either on to "Magnetic Tape",
which they have yet to really "nail", or into a console and
then back out to outboard gear, and then back to the console
and then back out again to a PC...etc...

ALL of those variables, and "Chaos Theory" are what make 
for a great deal of the "sound", which an algorithm simply
isn't going to reproduce.  And THAT is one of the reasons 
that certain consoles are "revered"...

The MEER THOUGHT that a $50 plugin is going to "give that
to you" is ridiculous IMO...

HALF of the magic in the plugins comes from the "gear that
was used to sample it", and not from the "algorithm" per se...
but that's not going to replace "hardware" or they'd just stop 
building Hardware, and STOP USING IT...common sense...as Plugins are 
dirt cheap...

cclarry


The magic is in electrons flowing through wires and 
circuits and Diaphragms and etc...into a multi-thousand 
dollar console and then, either on to "Magnetic Tape",
which they have yet to really "nail", or into a console and
then back out to outboard gear, and then back to the console
and then back out again to a PC...etc...
 

...then converted to MP3 and listened to on $10 earbuds...

Word.

And don't forget that most all hardware devices are slightly dissimilar to one another. No two sound "exactly" alike. And some of them...even a few of the most revered ones...sound like crap compared to others. I have seen (and you can too) and heard even the most sceptical a-list session players, in pro studio settings, using their favorite amps be completely unable to tell the difference between their amp and their amp as just modeled by the Kemper. And the same holds true for eqs and compressors...even more so. In any case, any and all dissimilarities will continue to fade into non existence.

You are one of my best ol forum pals Larry the Great...but there is no more "magic" than there are unicorns or leprechauns

:-)

If one searches for a particular sound character or a tool to get things sound "right", then yes, some pieces of gear definitely have "Magic"  components, that "just work" or "do it right".
Yet when you create music or sound, you can use whatever is available to you and get amazing results with it. Think early jazz bands. The technologies back then were ridiculous according to modern standards, but the music had and still has some magic to it.  And, unfortunately, the opposite is true quite often.