Thanks AT you have officially un-confused me

AD converters have vastly improved over the last 10 years, converters are probably not the problem, that being said there is a TON of stuff in the interface you use that CAN and WILL affect the quality of the signal...there is not a converter made (available to you) that doe snot need to be amplified in some circuit scheme...this is t=where the interface breaks down...

I have Lynx, Apogee, Edirol, Cakewalk, Kontakt, MOTU Focusrite, and Digidesign converters have used Echo's stuff and have a Behringer opto whatchamacallit sitting in the corner...

The majority of these guys are using the same converter chip or ones that are close enough in qualit and noise floor as to make difference moot...HOWEVER...how the interface amps the signal at such low levels is a HUGELY different beast...

The Focusrite sounded like a wet blanket next to the Apogee...but the edirol sounded like a wet blanket next to the motu...I took the entire preamp channels out of the behringer and found it was not the doorstop they designed it to be.

So while all the experts here conflate about other parts of the chain do not forget that that the audio interface you use IS A PREAMP itself (albeit it may be minuscule it still has to amp the signal somewhere)...it has to be in order for you to hear it...thats why you don't see a simple A/D they are ALL A/D D/A...and almost ALL of them amp it before conversion...or on the way somewhere...so what kind of preamp is it?

ASG,

it is a lot of stuff to learn all at once.  And there is always more to.  You've picked an expensive and time intensive thing to get into.

@

I also picked some really knowledgeable people to talk to! Thanks guys. In case anyone is wondering, my local guitar center is not big enough (says an employee there) as far as sales go to warrant having high end rack gear available for auditioning. So I've never so much as demo'd any rack mounted gear other than a friends 737. I feel like aside from word of mouth and YouTube videos, I'm blind. And we all know how many different things you can hear by word of mouth. 
    But at the end of the day one thing made clear is that id be paying a lot of money for a little improvement. Guess now I can devote funds to other areas!

...at the end of the day one thing made clear is that id be paying a lot of money for a little improvement

Bingo. Put your money into the beginning and end points of the signal chain: microphones and speakers, and acoustical treatments. That's where you'll get the biggest bang for the buck. And I'd even suggest holding off on those for awhile. 


Success is going to be 90% technique and 10% technology, although even that estimate may be overly optimistic on the technology side of the ratio. Take everything you read on the internet or watch in YouTube videos with a grain of salt, even if they sound authoritative. The ratio of bullsh*t to solid advice on the internet is also about 9:1.

Thanks bit flipper. Ill keep that in mind. SO, we've established that a faster hard drive will warrant higher rate/depth settings on projects and give me that nice clear brightness on my tracks with alot of high frequency content. Now, it may just be a placebo effect, but I only feel a need to do that on my soft synths, never on tracks from my motif. I've asked about this before and described the soft synths as not sounding as "good" as hardware sampled stuff. I get alot of different answers from people and I think I should clarify that when I say vst's don't sound as good, I don't mean that the sampled material is of low quality or that the functionality is poor, I'm saying that it doesn't sound as close to radio ready as sampled hardware does. I've been trying for the life of me to find out why, because I want to invest into applying that quality to my vst's but I don't know where to start.
I want to know what it is exactly inside of hardware machines that makes them sound so good. I refuse to believe that it's JUST good eq like I heard the other day. If it was I'm sure that's all people would invest in and they'd get legendary sound quality. So, what is it about hardware boards, that makes them sound like.....like hardware boards!?

Hard drive speed won't have any effect on sound quality. It may, however, let you record more things at once or play back more streaming samples at once.

VST samples absolutely can sound as good as any hardware ROMpler. And even though it's considered blasphemy in many quarters, I'll extend that even to software synthesizers versus analog hardware. Computer-based sound sources can be extraordinarily good, often far superior to conventional hardware synths.

The difference you may be hearing with your hardware samplers is reduced dynamic range compared with computer-based sample libraries. Most hardware synths that play samples (e.g. Motif, Fantom) have a limited number of velocity layers compared to sample libraries on your computer. They are compressed out of the box. That's exactly what you need for live use, but for recording you want to start with wider dynamic range and then squash it to taste. That's what most people mean when they say "radio ready".

As to what makes hardware sound better/different from their software equivalents, that's a huge topic fraught with controversy and mythology. The short version: you can do what you want with software alone, as long as you learn your tools and techniques really well. Hardware might have a slight edge, but a production done all in software by someone who really knows what they're doing will easily beat a production done with only hardware by someone who doesn't. Expensive hardware is simply not a shortcut to great productions.