But these days, past a certain price point, you don't really get much cleaner. It's not like it was when you found studios with a ( relatively nice say, Peavey AMR ) console and a Fostex 1" 16 track, to where a nicer console and better tape machine were audibly better.
I have a CD or two done with a D&R console and a Mitsu DASH, and I'd say this is comparable. Room and human factors dominate.
You can get 8 channels of A/D-D/A with Lightpipe for 8 more for $500 bucks and while I can't say definitively it's as good as it gets, it loops back to < -90dB for noise & distortion. It's good enough to where the "worst element" is usually me :)
Mics (and to a lesser degree high-end preamps) are not so easily replicated as digital gear.
If you want the sound of a Neumann U87, or U47, or Shure SM7, or 57, then nothing - nothing - is going to scratch that itch like the right mic for the job, if you really know what it is you're listening for.
Preamps and signal processors too... I once thought as you did: that digital DAWs have so many advantages over hardware that it just never made sense to put $5000 into a particular piece of hardware when the same money would buy a pile of digital plugins.
Until I had all the digital gear possible, and I came face to face with GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. Audio starts life as analog and that's the beginning of everything that follows in the signal chain. Past that there are certain non-linear things that happen in analog that are particularly euphonic and hard to reproduce digitally.
For example I've got pretty much every plugin compressor ever made, but nothing can take the place of my UA/RE175 compressor, because it's delightfully nonlinear and chaotic and valve-y.
And even if you could perfectly model it, what you can't do is put it where you need it: in the signal chain before A/D conversion, so you're packing as much information into the track as possible. The same goes for mics. Mics distort the sound more than anything in the straight signal chain. Every mic has a fingerprint - once that fingerprint is in the sound, it's there. Same goes for the fingerprint of the musicians instrument / amp. And the room. Etc.
And thus my maxim: the earlier in the signal chain you can get the sound you want, the better.
"Fix it in the mix" is the devil. "Fix" is something you do to a cat.
