[MonkeyMan]

WK. Quite simply rubbish in = rubbish out. There is no question in that.

But as previously mentioned one area that should not be overlooked is the quality of your A/D D/A conversion. With the wrong choice of converters no matter how excellent or well played the input sound may be it can sound bloody awful once your creative masterpiece is dithered down to 44.1 kHz 16bit CD. This was one of the key issues with the first generation of audio CD's and CD players - the sound was very harsh due to poor conversion. So in this case yes your reasoning is flawed. Decent conversion does cost decent money.

But I do see the angle you are coming from. More kit is not always best - as there can be an emphasis on tools rather than creative flow and output. Liam Howlett from the Prodigy is the best example I can give - after having a modest personal studio and producing some of the most influential and best selling dance music of the 90's, his studio went into overdrive on getting kit. In his own words he totally lost the plot and his output was killed due to overdosing on too much kit and not getting the best out of it. He was only saved when a learned studio engineer told him to get back to basics. So he binned his kit - bought a laptop and a copy of Reason and never looked back.

My old trusted Atari ST running Creator was a fantastically stable rock solid piece of kit (I produced my first white label records on this) - but to suggest not to progress and move to an Apple Mac G5 running Logic 7 is sheer madness.

Onwards and upwards - never backwards.