Right Or Wrong About Hardware?

Apologies to Steven, who I do like on a personal level exchanging posts, but I really don't think his ear is very educated. Else he's just too influenced by commercial realities.

Elementary! (A.C. Doyle is one of my fave writers BTW)
Chris

Piggybacking on mrholmes question, and I don't doubt this has been debated here before, but hopefully I'm framing it in a different light.

What is it that is so hard to emulate that has plugins coming up ~1% short of hardware. Are there some things that are easier to emulate than others? mrholmes suggested that solid state electronics are perhaps the easiest.  If that's true, what's hard? ..what's missing?  Tubes? ..Iron?

Or is the problem more sinister? drbill  suggested that the more plugins you slap on, the flatter (more 2D) things become, which doesn't make sense unless the plugin is actually doing a disservice to the sound.

That confirms my impression.
The denser the arrangement is, the more is going on the harder it is to get the sound I have in my mind.
As soon I batch process signals with some hardware artifacts it gets more easy to manupulate the sound with the plug ins.

IMO this speaks out loud for the fact that hardware is not obsolet yet.

Is this an educated, scientific fact or just something you made up and believe? Honest question. I just googled "phantom components" and got nothing. 

Yeah, that's a solid response from johneppstein. As a young gun who started on the plugins but made a migration over to a heavily HW-based hybrid setup, my experience was that the plugins taught me how the hardware operates on a fundamental level. Like, here's what the hardware does functionally.

Then, the world of hardware shifted the experience of doing those functional jobs into a territory that sometimes feels downright magical. I presume much of that is due to the harmonics and distortion, but I imagine so much of the magic of real gear is the sum of all of the components used. And I feel like it must be so hard to create code that accounts for every possible real-world interaction between everything, under every condition.

Now, there's something else too, and I think drbill talks about this a lot. There's a way it "feels" to use hardware too that can be inspiring. The LTL stuff especially really made mixing more fun for me. In the totally ITB world, I feel like I would get too damn hung up in the weeds. I'd become way too obsessed with making sure everything was "correct" to within a fraction of a db, or would constantly be re-mixing and re-jiggering until I practically loathed the song I was working on.

I'm gonna get kinda lofty and romantic here, but I've come to take an almost metaphysical approach to it now. It's honestly satisfying to me to think about it like I'm sending the audio off on a journey when it leaves the DA and becomes a real-life, tangible (though I wouldn't actually touch it for safety reasons lol) electrical current that passes through several components, getting changed in real-time at the touch of a button or twist of a knob. And when you commit to things it feels special to me. Like, this is a capture of a moment in time that isn't easily recallable, but so what? There will never be another passthrough that's 100% exactly the same, just as there will never be another performance of the song that's exactly the same. And for my money, that's kinda special. Go ahead and tell me I'm overly sappy about this. It floats my boat.

One plug in?  Maybe not.  But maybe.  However, put 20 plugins in the mix, then put 20 pieces of hardware doing the same thing and ask me if I can hear the difference.    Even my wife hears that difference.

I didn't buy  96 i/o of HDX hardware and tens upon tens upon tens of thousands in hardware just because the hardware was 5% better.  

I bolded and made that red for emphasis.  This is exactly it.  How a hardware EQ or Comp reacts to 5k on a kick drum hitting at +18dB vs. hi hat hitting at -18dB is different, and that's what the plugins don't get.  At least that my theory.  As to "why" and "how" and doing scientific A/B's - that's beyond my scope of interest.  If I put it up and hear a difference, I'll roll with that.  Whether it's a plug or hardware.  Doesn't matter to me.  But from experience, all things being equal - 1176 plug vs. 1176 hardware for instance - the hardware wins 95% of the time.

To piggyback, those individual components of every circuit - some of which are incredibly complex (as I know from the dev of the Silver Bullet) can be quite different side to side.  Spec-ing even the highest level of components available still leaves some degree of L/R differences, which in the analog world comes across as "depth".  Something that I have not seen any plugins emulate.  L and R are treated identically in a stereo EQ unless you're moving dual mono.

Exactly my thoughts.  To take your 1176 example, when I owned one it was a light bulb moment comparing it to plugins.  The plugins sounded really good, and a lot of the time I couldn't tell the difference when using the HW as an insert.  BUT...when I used the 1176 in an actual hardware chain, between mic pre, eq, etc, the difference was much more profound.  There's a sound of HW interacting with HW that is lost ITB.  Someone smarter than me can explain impedences and such, but it really makes a difference.