It's funny how different people can get different ideas into their heads concerning particular technologies. My vision of state-of-the-art digital recording (or photography or video) is one of perfect clarity, colour, detail, and no lack of "organic-ness". I've been playing with digital audio since 1982-ish when it most definitely was not like that! 8 bit processing was not acceptable, for sure, but I once applied analogue companding noise reduction to 8 bit processing, and it was a revelation. Raw 12 bit digital was almost acceptable. At the same time I was playing with a most-definitely non-state of the art Teac A3440 machine, so I had no romantic notions of the sacred-ness of analogue quality. So in my mind, while home made digital circuitry was almost acceptable, commercial (and fairly expensive) analogue recording was not all that much better. Once 16 bit recording became standard I was ready to be convinced by the perfection of digital. But then on top of that along came 24 bit, and then oversampling ADCs, 192 kHz and dither! Had I come at this from the other direction, I might have got different notions into my head regarding the physical form of the equipment somehow reflecting the audio quality of the medium, or some such.