Sheriff,
Chil!!!
Surely you don't just write in rock minour. You also write in rock major. LOL

I do not know why you fail to recognize that recording at high bit rates leads to better results. A/D conversion has evolved a great deal since Atari Falcons were discontinued. Recording with 24 bit converters and even mastering is better. whatever it gets dithered to wen recorded to a CD is a different story. The results are still better.
Mathematics aren't the only factor here.
I'm not sure as to what you actually mean by me waisting hard drive space because I've got just over 700Gb of it total. Even if I get very sloppy with recording and don't edit and don't trancate the files I stil use up a fraction of all the space that I've got available to me. Even if I had just half of what I've got it's way more than enough. In fact most of my work gets backed up to DVDs (that's after I usually cut out the bits that do not end up being used on the actual recording).
OR CD's for that matter.

Another thing that you keep looking away from is sample memory. It will actually cost you some astronomical amounts of $$$ to get enough hardware to be able to load several gigabytes of samples. In most cases it will be impossible to do so with hardware. Software does it on a fly.

I don't know what you mean by so many additional drivers and hardware components needed to run soft synths. All one really needs is a USB MIDi controller, an external sound card and that's it.

Since I haven't used PC and Windows for music I really have nothing to say about them. I only use Macs. They work. My G4 upstairs is hooked up to an EDIROL FA 101 firewire interface and it doesn't require any additional drivers. You just plug it in. It uses Apple audio drivers and since MAc OS X is designed especially for music and graphics there is no latency issues or any issues actually. You plug-in the card and you use it. It comes with it's own MIDI port. Plug in and go setup.

No you do not have any real first hand experience of using software synths on a computer that works. Rather, you have a really crappy second hand experience of using your friend's system which doesn't function that well if I understood correctly. It is really up to your friend to complain about it or upgrade his system to something better. There are a lot of soft synth users in this forum and they do not complain. There is nothing to complain about. If things are setup properly and you have all the appropriate components installed DAW and soft synths work without any problems. Surely there are issues. But that is mainly because things have advanced quite a bit since the times of Atari Falcon systems and naturally got more complicated.

Yes, it will cost as much and may be a little more to get a decent computer setup but you will be able to do more than hardware can offer. Read threads in this forum. Ask people who use soft synths.

-ED-

[This message has been edited by 3351 (edited 09-27-2005).]