I am also coming from a time when an 8-track tape recording studio was all there was when I wanted to record my music. The concept of “home studio” was only imaginable to the rich who could afford all the necessary hardware. Roughly it was only after the advent of the Atari ST that we could listen to our music at home, but only in the form of MIDI. For audio, you still needed to go to the studio. Then emerged ADAT and the like and recording audio at home became possible. After that technology advanced to offer hard-disk recording to the masses, and ever since that time we’ve all been doing it. Recording studios are still out there, and we still need them for more demanding projects.
Last night I was with a few relatives talking about the good old days. A 25-year-old asked his father: “How could you even live without a cell phone when you were young?” The father calmly answered: “Much more comfortably!”
When I come to think about it, I realize that we have always been “stuck” with the technology of the day. But technology used to advance very slowly during our years. At present the speed of technology advancement is so fast that we are not only “stuck” but also even “dominated” by it. And this is scary.
I largely agree with you on the point that whatever computer related product we buy today loses its value very quickly, and that we need to spend more and more after the introduction of newer stuff if we still wish to stay in the business–a VSTi could be released tomorrow, which we couldn’t imagine it could ever exist, we go on and but it merely because we decide that we need it to take our ongoing project to the next level. So we are “tempted” by, and “give in” to new stuff if we can afford to buy.
I just want to say that economics is not the main issue here, rather it is the high speed of today’s technology advancement that is also dominating economics, which in turn is devouring us all up.
I wonder what new features Cubase 10.5 will have to offer! Don’t tell me you don’t. 