New hardware?

[TweakHead]

Yep, I also feel that software quality has gone through the roof lately. One of the things we don't talk about much here: compressors, equalizers - specially those that you use to color the sound or shape it's tone, rather then surgical stuff; reverb is really much better then when I first started using music software, there's some lush sounding ones out there. Things like Melodyne... I mean, it's just black magic. Now there's also a great audio to midi thing in Ableton that's also amazing. Being able to use such a thing as Monark or Diva - I think it sounds even better then Arturia's Mini Moog V, even though the movement thing on Arturia's can lead to places you can't go with the others... - and earing those filters gives me the chills sometimes. I mean, we're able to do stuff today that is just simply amazing, like having access to tons of high quality samples for drums or whatever we can choose on the fly - I'm thinking Kontakt here - and replace drums as we wish to test things out or whatever. That thing alone puts almost any hardware sampler - even the really expensive ones - to shame, and that's undebatable.

I have to agree with you when it comes to physical objects and instruments holding their value more. The Virus is great to tweak and get inspired, it's not all just about the sound. And there's a tendency for me to explore it more because it's just right there. But it's not just synthesizers. I don't really feel the need to invest in a Neve equalizer or even the Eventide fx unit or something. For such a big buck, I'd rather take my chances with software even though I know this things are still killer but... I feel compressors used to be lame and now they behave like the real stuff, same goes for Equalizers. Which ones do you guys like best here?