heres my position on this subject.
rapid technology change has put a very good radio quality CD press quality studio in the hands of anyone these days.
without going the proprietary pro tools route.
for about 3k you can have a great excellent sounding studio.
5k if you want fancy and are lazy shopping for deals.
as ive said many times. an amd athlon. and i agree with bulls hit
a delta 1010 lt sound card for multiple inputs, a few nice mics, a yamah mg mixer
(agree with bh again), a couple of decent mic pre's for lead up front tracks.
and the software i use. which i wont repeat again. and a pair of yorkville monitors. in my estimation you could spend another 100k over this
3k budget, and the law of diminishing returns comes into play.
from what ive seen of guys whove laid down the whole enchilada 103k for example they got maybe at best 5 per cent better quality.
because people forget to factor all the other variables in like source material.
and its own self noise as well as the noise level of even the best of microphones.
one crazy thing i like to do over the years is record a spoken track with top flight equipment. then do the same track with a radio shack mixer i modified the electronics of. and another track done with my home made diy preamps. and invite seasoned friends of my to do blind listening tests.
the results are laughable.
in conclusion - you dont need to spend a ton of money to get good results
these days.