Yah, I made my decision also.
Cutting my teeth at a large pro studio in Nashville, I realized three things.
One: was that nobody ever used the old "out-of date"
Studer A-80 2", making it always available for an intern who wanted to come in late at night to learn the studio.
Two: was that the recording on the 2" sure sounded a heck of a lot better than the Pro Tools recordings I assisted with during the day (the engineers were world famous guys, so of course the "sounds" were great, it's just that the sounds on playback sounded a lot flatter than what went in).
Three: (most important) is that all day long, out of studio A,B,C, and D you could here engineers complaining, or very frequently "freaking out", because some drive just failed, or something locked up, or someone never hit save, or latency this, clock jitter that. "Get this drive shipped out to Apple ASAP, it needs to be recovered." My drive won't work with your system...the list could go on. My point is they were all miserable with digital, and about half would daydream back to the days of simple tape.
So those experiances pretty much made me realize that digital is pretty dumb. Why all that hassle, to get an inferior sounding product (which by the way, in my 4 years at this studio NOT ONCE! did any engineer ever reply to my questions about "why are you digital if it is a pain" with the answer, because it sounds better).
Well, there is my sunday morning (pre coffee) rant.
p.s.
I have total respect for home digital guys, in my opinion people should record by any means they have available and with any budget. I am more refering to larger projects who have a budget, and no excuse in my opoinion to not be using analog. Sorry guys, all who will defend the idea of dumb digital in large studios with "tape hiss is too much" or "we need the extra tracks" don't know much. A good tape machine (studer, otari, ampex) with high output tape has a pretty damn low noise floor. In my experience, all engineers who complain about tape noise have never even used a good tape machine. As far as tracks go, c'mon guys if you need 48 tracks to record a 5 piece rock band, then maybe you should find another profession.
WOW! didn't mean to be so negative, I really need to stop typing and get somne coffe!!!
) is that the line ins are indeed unbalanced and, as for the rest of your post, yes, you pretty much have hit the nail on the head. You are indeed correct. 