i stand corrected on the price argument, i was thinking of the UAD / DSP signal processing method as competiton for hardware as discussed earlier in the thread.

I do find it interesting how strong you feel about vst (software only) compression, since this relies on a decent platform, decent hardware, plenty of spare CPU, plenty of spare RAM, and no other issues that are commonly associated with PC/MAc operation.

Maybe this is taken for granted in the cases discussed but i know i personally would have a problem freeing up spare load for the amount of standard / sidechaining & Parallel compression required to get that lovely analogue warmth into the tracks.