ACB,
I think in the box works fine. SSL, Neve, large format consoles and tons of high end outboard gear makes a difference ... BUT... DAW has come far enough that there's no excuse for bad sounding recordings. DAW is good enough to produce top quality commercial recordings. Good front end, monitors and mics and it's just fine. Do plug in s LA2's sound as good as a hardware version? No. But the spirit of it is there in that plug in. It works. The stock VST plug ins on Cubase VST 5.1 are just fine. They work. Comps are fine. Verbs are ok, not the best but it works. It's up to the user to make it art. What is recorded and how the tools are used are the most important factors. I bet if Bill Putnam walked right out of the 50's and sat down at a Cubase system he would be perfectly happy with what was there. He would just make a great recording (maybe of Nat "King" Cole?) with it..He might point out it dosen't sound as good as something else but the difference is not as much as some would think. Good enough to make recordings and mix's that sound good. In the end, it's fine. ... Fats

Having really nice outboard equipemt allows you to take advantage of knowing how it sounds and letting the box come very close. It has been a while since I exclusively mastered anything in analog but I need to go back to it from time to time for a wake up call to keep my digital cobbling sharp.

Sometimes you can slip some and think the digital is doing fine..until you go back to analog and hear what you are missing. This said, it is very possible to do it in the box if you know how far to take it to get there.