Ha ha... people who ascribe magic powers to bits of vintage hardware really really wind me up. Like the 'warmth and humanity' of music comes from the fact that the oscillators on the vintage synth go slightly out of tune. And there's no point trying to make music using software because it can't get exactly the same sort of hiss as a real space echo. And now you get the same thing about the crummy converters, shit interface and limited sample menu of old akai samplers being the reason old jungle sounds so ruff and exciting, despite that fact that at the time everyone else was chucking them out because they were flat and soulless compared to 'real' analogue stuff.
It always seems like people are obsessed with trying to capture the sound of the magic equipment that was used by the people who ten years ago were making do with what they could get hold of and actually writing some tunes...
Pretty much agreed here.
Jeez, use whatever you can get your hands on- find what you like and use it.
I was a bit shocked when a few people were saying to the reformed Ike Yard last year that well, because we weren't using the same (old , analog ) gear as we did in '82 it just wasn't as good now.
Of course, the artist say " *uck you" to that.
All kinds of gear -new or old - has their niche, just depends on what you need it for.
IY had a lot of fun when we reformed in 2007 because once we got together in one room and saw what gear we had at the time, it sounded very nice together as we always had a somewhat 'ad hoc' sonic anyway.
A combination of Roland synths, a Groove Box, Reason drum machines + granular soft synths and sound fx for movie scores software running off an old Apple laptop plus guitars and bass sounded just fine, to us.
Our new group uses an old Akai recording deck to tape our rehearsals and that was a total step up to have multitracks of our live jams- the deck was just sitting there, in storage unused.
I just took tracks from another old Akai ( the 12 trk recorder, with 8mm video tape -like storage ) for the Voodooists rerelease and those tracks sounded great too.