Comment Re:Studion Quality work (Score 1) 183
A large recording company w/ a studio still has one fundamental advantage over all other recording setups - i hardly need to say it - money. It has been proven by example many times that if you throw a vast amount of money at something, you can achieve things that can only be leveraged by finance - like maybe an acoustically tuned and isolated studio building built from the ground up for pristine audio characteristics. Joe Musician sure doesn't have a function in his copy of Protools for 'sweet ass mofo acoustics with valve warmth' - though lord know I've looked, long and hard.
The law of diminishing returns is surely going to kick in big time once a studio budget hits $1M, and admittedly this ceiling would probably be lower for an all-digital setup; but if any individual can record music on a PC with superior tone to a Steve Albini Black Box recording (a fine example of why home recording cannot be a threat to good studio-based audio recording) I'll eat shit out of a jar of rotting worms.
If music changes it's forms and tastes evolve beyond what is currently conventional, which they must eventually, THEN the new tools of audio - low rent digital - will come into their own.