Music Appreciation

A reverb that authentically reproduces the physical echo chambers of the most famous studios or the sound of a church with cement floors and hard walls, or a jazz club full of people, or a famous concert hall, or ... you get the picture .. might cost $50-$200, and cover ALL those cases very convincingly.

The famous studios still have their huge consoles and racks of compressors and whatever, but the gap in fidelity between the most legendary studio hardware and a $49 software plug-in is very narrow now. IMHO, those large consoles and racks are mostly for show, or because the engineers know how to get "their sound" from the hardware and don't want to learn how to accomplish the same thing in the digital realm. But they are retiring or a dying breed.

The one area that really hasn't changed so much is microphones. For the best commercial results, especially with exposed vocals, it is still common to see a microphone costing $2000 or more.