Four Tet is an interesting guy - produces all of his music inside the computer with virtually no hardware, very few plugins, and not even a MIDI keyboard. I think his first couple of albums were made with a Soundblaster card going through his living room hi-fi. I heard he uses a Waves compressor, a couple of reverbs and that's it. He just spends hours chopping up sounds and beats by ear and arranging the wav's in Pro Tools (although he used to use Cakewalk years ago). Listening to his stuff makes me realize that you really can make great music in your bedroom with the minimum of gear.