Look....PURE COMMON SENSE tells you that they are not 
going to give you the "same" quality in a $50 plugin that
you get in $5,000 hardware unit.  The very thought is ridiculous...

Do you really think when you buy an Alpha Compressor Plugin
from Plugin-Alliance that you're getting "the same thing" as 
the $10,000 hardware unit?  NO YOU'RE NOT.

You can think what you want...I KNOW BETTER....

I have those "REVERB PLUGINS" and they don't sound like their
Hardware counterparts...they "Mimic", but it's definitely not "the same".

As I stated before, if THAT were the case, they'd stop building hardware
and concentrate on Plugins.  Studios wouldn't continue to buy half million dollar Neve and SSL Consoles
and spend millions on outboard gear.  Large scale Studios would DROP THEIR ELECTRIC
BILLS DRASTICALLY - not to mention "equipment expenses" by just buying
a really great PC, a decent inteface, and emulations...BUT THEY DON'T ...
and there IS a reason for that...

They sell BILLIONS in "almost quality" plugins to "wanna be" Engineers and Producers
like you and I...who "like to think" they have "great ears" and that they're getting the same thing....
trust me, you're not...It's just "business" for them. And they sell it BIG TIME.

You're not going to get, in a $50 plugin, what they put into a $10,000 hardware unit...
plain and simple.

I really can't believe how irrational and naive people are...

WAKE UP!!!  It's about MONEY...and that's all I'm saying about this...

I find the very notion ridiculous...common sense tells you otherwise...
not to mention WHAT I HEAR.

I have never seen a video of any of these pro engineers making an album using a $400 interface and some plugins.
 
But Warren Huart may have proved me wrong.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdeSbvVba-o
 
 

I'm not saying you can't get quality results...you can...

But to say that it's going to be "the same" as a Mix done in
a Multi-million dollar studio, and mastered by a Professional
Mastering house...I don't think so...

 
And if you look "Behind" him, you can see what he "prefers" to use...LOL

cclarry
 
And if you look "Behind" him, you can see what he "prefers" to use...LOL

I was being sarcastic. I'm with you on this. Plugins are our racks of expensive gear we otherwise could not afford..

Mosvalve

cclarry
 
And if you look "Behind" him, you can see what he "prefers" to use...LOL

I was being sarcastic. I'm with you on this. Plugins are our racks of expensive gear we otherwise could not afford..

Right on Bob...

cclarry
Look....PURE COMMON SENSE tells you that they are not 
going to give you the "same" quality in a $50 plugin that
you get in $5,000 hardware unit.  The very thought is ridiculous...

Do you really think when you buy an Alpha Compressor Plugin
from Plugin-Alliance that you're getting "the same thing" as 
the $10,000 hardware unit?  NO YOU'RE NOT.

You can think what you want...I KNOW BETTER....

I have those "REVERB PLUGINS" and they don't sound like their
Hardware counterparts...they "Mimic", but it's definitely not "the same".

As I stated before, if THAT were the case, they'd stop building hardware
and concentrate on Plugins.  Studios wouldn't continue to buy half million dollar Neve and SSL Consoles
and spend millions on outboard gear.  Large scale Studios would DROP THEIR ELECTRIC
BILLS DRASTICALLY - not to mention "equipment expenses" by just buying
a really great PC, a decent inteface, and emulations...BUT THEY DON'T ...
and there IS a reason for that...

They sell BILLIONS in "almost quality" plugins to "wanna be" Engineers and Producers
like you and I...who "like to think" they have "great ears" and that they're getting the same thing....
trust me, you're not...It's just "business" for them. And they sell it BIG TIME.

You're not going to get, in a $50 plugin, what they put into a $10,000 hardware unit...
plain and simple.

I really can't believe how irrational and naive people are...

WAKE UP!!!  It's about MONEY...and that's all I'm saying about this...

I find the very notion ridiculous...common sense tells you otherwise...
not to mention WHAT I HEAR.

There is still a processing limit to how many plugins one can run at a time.  A full blown project typically still needs hardware.  And the interface to get into the "box" is huge.  Of course a $200 interface will not yield the same results as a $500K console into the box.  However, once that signal is in the box, you would be shocked how small the difference is between a good hardware compressor or reverb is to what you can do just in the box.  You are making the assumption that the technology will not get there eventually and I strongly disagree it will.  Once you can dedicate the processing power to those functions it is just the right algorithms to create the quality sound.  You can make exact copies of those reverb as stated they are computers, to think it can't be done is naive.  In fact, many reverbs used on hit recordings over the years are of lower quality than what you can get with Overloud.  
 
It is no different than suggesting a hardware SM57 is equal to a U87 mic in terms of quality and fidelity.  
 
Large scale studios have a vested interested in buying and using fancy things.  Do you think someone is going to pay $400/hour to play in someones basement with a laptop?  Studios ARE a dying breed and it is because home studio equipment including plugins have gotten quite good and the real limiting factor in many cases is the user once you have comparable mics and pres along with a decent room.  Many great studios have gone bankrupt because they bought the gear you claim they need.  How many studios have you gone to recently?  I'm friends with a few successful studio owners and I know others that have needed to move onto other things.  
 
In a mix you are not going to tell the difference done by someone that really knows what they are doing if you swap out a hardware compressor for a really high quality plugin using the same mic and pres and interface.  They will sound "different" but you will not be able to tell which is which, the real thing or the plugin with any degree of certainty outside of random guessing.  
 
I've done quite a bit of testing with this theory.  
 
You make a lot of assumptions.  I've worked in fancy studios and I've worked with Grammy winning artists (as if that even matters).  
 
There are pieces of hardware that still excede the quality of a plugin or computer processor hardware.  The Trainwreck amp I have access to is one of those pieces of gear.  However, there are pieces of hardware that are on par with what you can get in the box.  There are pieces of hardware that do not sound as good as some plugins.  

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
 

Some conformation regarding Larry's statement about hardware having magic. You have to watch the entire video.
 
https://www.producelikeapro.com/video/reid-shippen-studio-tour-warren-huart-produce-like-pro/
 
 

Emulating hardware...or anything else for that matter...is just a matter of computing power. Our own brains, for gawd's sake, are really no more than well integrated, fast computers. Computing power is growing...and will continue to do so...at an exponential rate. End of argument. There is no magic. There are no unicorns. There are no fairies. There are no spirits or ghosts.

Unless and until we obliterate our species and our world...which itself is a real possibility...we will continue to overcome every technological problem in our path. No matter how long...or short...a time it takes.

This has been a fact since we crawled out of the sea. And will remain so. Period.

Wake up.

I think part of the issue is that people above a certain age prefer the sound of hardware because it gets them closer to the sounds they grew up with. Never underestimate the power of nostalgia in coloring what we wrongly suppose to be objective judgments. To a kid growing up now who has no clear defined concept of what "analog warmth" or "analog character" is, the idea that hardware sounds better is much less obvious. That super clean "in the box" sound isn't necessarily worse, it's just different. It's just that most of us have no sentimentality toward it.

I think I've learned to appreciate both. I'm working on a track now that has some super clean sounding synths in it and at first I thought let's take this into Mixbus and do the usual things to dirty it up a little, but then I thought wait, why can't this cleanness be a feature of the sound, just another color in the palette? And now I think I'm going to leave it clean. I recently watched one of those "in the studio with" videos featuring Four Tet and he said that for the album he was working on then, he decided to bypass the usual sending the kid through a console thing and just leave everything pristine in the box. It's just another artistic decision, not necessarily better or worse.

Andrew Scheps recently switched to all in the box and he said it was because a) today's plugins are more than good enough and b) you minimize the sound degradation which comes from converting from digital to analog and vice versa so unless you're recording to tape then that DAC is going to be a quality bottleneck when sending digital audio out into hardware.