Recommendations for first piece of outboard gear....

Building on Dr Bill’s “alive” comment. I have never used a plug in and had the positive visceral feeling. I have using OB, real gear is just a tangible physical and tactile feeling, that engages me way more than plug ins and I think focusses your attention more.

If I was starting over now, with no OB, the silver bullet mkii would be #1 on my list, followed by what’s said above a good 2 channel comp and eq for your 2 buss.

The new Stam stereo pultec has mid band, tube and solid state circuitry, would cover a lot of ground and you could use it for tracking too.

Yes, there will be quite a difference in these. First if we think vinyl vs. digital. Even if you’d had the 48/24 full digital file of it and compared it with the vinyl the experience would differ quite a bit. Mostly because the master would be rather different (assuming the digital would be a remastered version). The vinyl master would likely have more headroom, less compressed, be more centered and have an over all different character to it due to the vinyl player and the whole chain. Now you have further compared it with a version compressed and likely normalized by a streaming platform. Which have degraded the file quite a bit. Even if the master would have been sonically identical to vinyl version the difference would be very audible at this stage.

The vinyl as a medium together with the player and the environment created around it usually sets you in a very unique listening context which is hard to recreate in other ways, the sonics and the ritual. So I try not to compare vinyl with anything, rather see the digital master and the vinyl master as two separate products. But I do compare the streaming platform with the digital master and the streaming platform always disappoints. So I have began to even consider that as a third product of the record and accept it for what it is not to loose my sleep over it.

EDIT: and in the midst of all my rambling, the point might be, the digital can offer qualities like wider stereo images and clarity the vinyl doesn’t, while it offers the punchy bold lows and mids with an unprecedented intimacy…. for example 😉

Try the Portico II on Access Analog. That will probably get you the most for the least money if you buy one. These new Silver Bullets could be even better, I just have to try one. Fusion also has a lot to offer too. A lot of the less expensive hardware that I've tried doesn't have a lot of sweet spots and I believe Dan said the same thing above about certain hardware in general. You can get some really expensive stuff for $150-$250 a month payments on Vintage King and Reverb. Just get someone at VK who is willing to go 48 months with their card. You could just sell it if you don't end up earning what you wanted. The most economical thing is to go for quality stuff to run your whole mix through and then just use plugins for the rest. Keep adjusting the plugins in ways that get the most out of your hardware. Settings that worked on plugin versions generally worked on hardware in my experience. You just have a lot more sweet spots on the hardware. Another thing is to try the mastering chains at Access Analog. You can sort of sweeten a plugin mix that has issues, but there's a lot of limitations as to what hardware can do to solve or hide mix issues. Saturation is probably the biggest difference maker with hardware. You can run a plugin mix through a hardware Shadow Hills or Elysia Alpha compressor and it's not all of a sudden going to transform into something lively and full. Can't say I have a lot of experience with hardware eqs. But I felt like the Massive Passive at Access Analog wasn't really any better than the PA SPL PQ plugin. It was way better than the Massive Passive plugins though. Finally, using dither before your hardware insert makes a huge difference. Stuff sounded much harsher with the dither plugin off. Btw, what about your converter? There's a Youtube video of a guy using the Portico II through his converter and then the Access Analog version that was probably going through an Aurora N at the time(they sometimes run them through their Antelope Galaxy instead). The Access Analog Portico sounded much better.

I wasn't expecting a very specific piece of gear to stand head/shoulders above in recommendations, more like "get an xyz type thing," but it seems that the Silver Bullet is in fact just that and now at the top of the list for an outboard piece to get first.

I have several of those DRS Q4 units. I'm contemplating more with Warren's price right now. That's a lot of unit for the money.

I love the color they have on 2 bus so I'm currently looking into strapping my 500 series pair to my 2 bus. I have used the EQ on a mix before and it can be really nice. It's a unique sounding EQ. It's my only experience with gyrator EQ thus far. Stepped knobs make for easy recall.

I prefer you spend it than my wife....she doesn't buy studio gear with it.

What do you mostly track or mix? Any references what you’d like to achieve and what framework sonically are you aiming for. Silver bullet might be the thing for you. It might also be that you aim for something totally different. It’s good to look as far ahead as possible not to have to replace gear if possible, but rather build on the preferred sound. 

I won't go to the ITB/Hybrid debate so my recommendation for 2bus would be a tube compressor (Manley, Thermionic, Fairchild etc..) and an eq..
BAX, new Terry Eq (https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a1ee9d9ccc5c53d7fc674fd/t/66b24c8eedee4d4a4b5cf035/1722961038845/Terry+Audio+-+SEQ+Factsheet+%26+Manual.pdf), Gyraf, Curve Bender, Api 5500, Pultec (maybe the new Stam).
You would also need a quality converter for the loop.

Tracking has a bigger influence than a 2-bus chain IMO, so depending on your work/hobby/interests I'd start there.
But then the most "boring" but important thing by far: room+speakers+acoustics+trinnov/GLM.

the lifelessness is from digital artifacts: eqs that distort the phase drastically, compressors that do not work at all upon the signal and cannot even detect the signal, non-linear functions that alias horribly and produce infinite harmonics of infinite harmonics, hard breaks in the code causing discontinuities in the wave form, etc.

Right now the most common are hard sounding decramped eqs (amplitude mostly corrected by pre-warping but phase even more screwed up, eg Pro q3 zero latency mode, Oxford eq, renaissance eq the most common) into dynamics processors about as “good” as a 3630 at best when set optimally (smacky bs) or totally defective (99% of emulations, what comes with the daw) and limiters that are essential downwards bit crushers and nasty clippers. And the whole thing will be thrown into some awful undereqed reverb like what comes with the daws, ported algorithms from old boxes minus the analog and digital distortion, or still now the early algorithms in Valhalla Vintage Verb which are absolutely disgusting compared to the newer ones like palace.

This has nothing to do with digital processing. There have been EQs for a long time with proper amplitude and phase (the Weiss EQ1, MDWEQ, PSP SQuad were some of the first), smoothed compressors since the 90s (Renaissance EQ and Oxford Dynamics), working fast compressors since Weiss DS1, Pro Audio DSP DSM, and Kotelnikov, and limiters capable of taking the peaks off since the Oxford Limiter which has a sound yes but it does work as advertised as an aggressive bus compressor and peak limiter.

The boringness is often from using emulations, stock plugs, etc at the very limited settings they are not broken on. They often have heavily simplified circuit models that omit a ton of behaviors and stuff. The most advanced ones are found in the newer cpu killing guitar stuff like cytomic the scream hd, newer overloud, mercurial spark onwards, the newer neuraldsp ones, the newer softube that in no way could run on uad’s old sharc chips but itb mixers want to cram in hundreds of plugs and and play with toys, not virtual instruments, yes these plugs are toys and they are dysfunctional toys where the clones might be toys incapabe of what the real thing does but are still semi-functional eq or compressor, and they want to use toys and the solution is to just use not touch the toys, not randomly distort everything (better start with good sound that doesn’t need to get filled in after being carved up like what happens in a medium to high gain amp) or pile on more crap and hope it works.

Unfortunate now we start with crap instruments, crap or boring samples in VSTi drum kits and sample libraries, lame digital synths, poorly set amp sims, because the budget to even fix the real amp is not there, much less go to a real studio and record and pay real musicians. Spotify ceo is worth 6 billion dollars and the business relationships are all conglomerate Tencent owns 61% of the voting shares of Tencent music, which owns a huge chunk of UMG, and Sony a competing major owns a big chunk of Tencent music, and all of these guys (and their owners) fund the streaming services which lose money on paper yet have billionaire owners, pay out based on cartel rates, use legalese to grandfather in older artists, and make new artists pay to play to get on the service and then payola their way onto a playlist. Am I the only one who smells a rat?

My vote would be new monitors.

Otherwise, AS 1178