1- because some of the very finest audio gear has an extremely desireable sound that is not replicable from plug ins and because 99% of music is digital nowadays, even stuff that lands on vinyl.
2- Music is digital now. Delivery formats are digital. Some die hard fans of AAA will keep everything on Tape in the studio and make sure at least some of their distribution will make it to vinyl, but even those folks are also making digital masters as well since they don't want to limit their audience to 'people who like their music with record players'.
Back to 1... DMG make some of the finest plug-ins available for pretty much any normal audio processing you want, at least at the mastering stage - EQ, compression, Mutli-Band compression, De-Essing, Limiting, etc. When designing plug-ins, there are many choices that are settled on by the designer and not made available to the end user in the GUI. DMG has made pretty much any variable that has ever been created and more, available in the GUI and they've done a remarkable job executing the code. In sum, for pro users and in this case I am talking about mastering engineers since this level of minutiae would be a waste of time for many creatives, you will find DMG plug-ins in the plug-in collection in many mastering engineer's toolboxes. When I was mastering I owned most of the talked about mastering-grade plug-ins and these were my favorite, almost all of the time. In spite of how nearly-perfect these are, the main EQ they made was not as musical sounding as running out of the DAW via DAC into my main analog EQ (Knif Eksa) and back into to my DAW via an ADC. Even the filtering options on that EQ made me halt HPF'ing and LPF'ing via plug-ins (and this includes FIR with an absurdly long window). For some, Sontec EQ's occupy this level musicality, for others Maselec, GML, Barry Porter EQ's. And this is often in conjunction with analog compressors that again have a musical sound and feel that has not yet been replicated via plug-ins.
During the pandemic I was splitting my time between Iceland and the US. My kids were with their mother in Iceland since life was screwed up for everyone in the US and they could have a normal life in Iceland (hence our decision to move them all over there). My mastering studio was in Brooklyn. It would have been amazing if I could have done everything in the digital domain as I wouldn't have had to shuttle back and forth (7 weeks in the US, 2-3 in Iceland) during the pandemic, but the quality is not the same and I was not able to turn in the same level of work working digitally.
I am interested to hear some of these top end DAC's. One of the best things about the Mytek's, which I settled on after listening to loopback tests from other companies offerings, was the ability to utilize various filtering options within DAC chip (Manhattan II uses Sabre 9038). This has an absolutely huge impact on the presentation of the music. I also know that designing gear with specs in mind can sometimes create a less pleasurable listening experience. Some of the most highly coveted audio gear of all time has comparatively poor specs; anyone who has ever heard someone sing into a lovely example of a U47, C12, M49, etc will testify that compared to modern mics, these deliver more seductive and involving tone and emotional pleasure than any microphone with specs besting these by a mile. The phase shift of a Pultec EQP and sound of the Peerless 217D transformer, again many engineers who have used one will say a digital EQ with vastly better specs does not sound as good (and there are plugins that will curve match analog EQ's). You can crank up negative feedback in an amplifier design but rarely does the listening experience continue to improve as the spec's get better and better.
I owned and ran a commercial studio in Brooklyn for 12 years. In that time I chased down a lot of ideas on audio, as audio was my life and the need to understand was primal. I was curious at one point why the reissue LA2A compressors did not sound like the coveted vintage versions and complained to my audio guru and tech, so he brought over his AP2500 to dig around because it was a fun question for him to try and help answer. I had amassed a small collection of various transformers used in old LA2A's and we found that the reissue input iron was a large departure from the original HA100x's. While they were supposed to be part for part recreations and the transformers were supposed to be recreations, the input iron wasn't even made with the same lamination type and thusly yielded a very different sounding compressor (it sounded good but without the mojo of the originals). HA100x's are great sounding transformers and the company that was remaking them was not even close (Magnetika). That was 20 something years ago so maybe that has changed by now.
Having been part of a lot of ABX testing in the pursuit of refining audio gear it is clear that specs are not everything. They are useful, and in some cases the best way of understanding why something doesn't sound good or something does. It's nice that some of the highly rated DAC's on here aren't so expensive; at some point I will try one of them with the Sabre 9038 and compare. There are various ways of implementing the chip so comparing to the Manhattan II will be a comparison of that and the analog stage inside. I think that'll be a fun test.
I am largely out of the music biz. I was very tired of it when I stopped about two years ago and moved my hobby to my main occupation, I keep a modest production setup in the mezzanine of my shop and will get around to picking and listening to one.
There is a lot of separating fools from their money, more so in the HiFi world, but also in the studio universe. In some cases vintage gear has become so absurdly priced that while it may sound better in some respect or another, it's not worth lusting after by anyone without a trust fund. And, great records can absolutely be made a couple of SM57's and not much else. I like the extreme efforts executed here in the pursuit of pulling the veil back on the wizard behind the curtain. My life in the pursuit of audio nirvana was a pretty deep one, much deeper than most who don't get into commercial studio ownership and I am hesitant to draw expectations of audio quality on specs alone.
