My favourite topic and welcome to the hybrid DAW crowd. You need a DA interface that allows you to send digital audio out to your Converter and then out to your analog gear,
Then AD it back into your DAW. The [[url=http://[/URL]="http://www.lynxstud…"]Aurora[/]="http://www.lynxstud…"]Aurora[/] , FF800 / RME http://www.rme-audio.de/en_index.php to name only a few... that will convert the audio to analog, What are you using now?
Find a budget and go from there. There are a lot of options.

Start reading on hybrid DAWs if you want to learn more. Its not cheap. You can use things like these:

Dangerous Products: D-BOX http://dangerousmusic.com/product/d-box/
Dangerous 2-BUS http://dangerousmusic.com/product/2-bus-plus/
SPL MixDream https://spl.info/en/products/summing/mixdream/overview.html

and the Folcrom which is a passive summing box
Roll Music Systems http://www.rollmusic.com/folcrom.php

That's lots of info to chew on.

Hello jmm
A number of outboard gear have digital and analog I/Os. Some DAWs feature automated latency compensation for external devices, too, which makes it really easy to work with external FXs.
You connect the , e.g., M6000, to the digital or analog I/Os of your soundcard, establish a new insert or send for the connected device and "ping" the loop through for detecting the right compensation time.
Now, you can use the outboard FX like a synchronized plugin with external controls. Don't forget to safe the settings, though. Use Midi or simply store it as preset on the device and make notes of its name.
Here, I have the DAW feature that some hardware devices and their presets are already stored and can be recalled and adjusted with a corresponding gui within the DAW.
Plugin reverbs, for example, are not yet quite as good as some HiEnd devices and sometimes I just want to use my favourite hw compressors, therefore I use outboard gear on my Nuendo rig with
many productions and w/o problems.

Thanks for the replies. I am glad to know it can be done, but some quick reading (including the provided links) tells me it is beyond my scope at the moment.

Not necessarily.

If your interface has analog I/O, you can route signals from your DAW to external gear and back in.
Then it becomes a question of is it a good idea to do this?

Like BigK said, there are many high-end outboard gear you might want to use.
But is your outboard gear any better than your plug-ins?
There is also the concern w/ latency, as he mentioned.

There's not anything I have that I want to use post-tracking. I do hit a few compressors while tracking, but that is independent of (pre) my DAW.