It really all depends on the type of production you will be doing. Five years ago I opend my project studio with a tascam 16 real to real, a oudated board and some mikes. Really i would sugest a simple HDR(hard disk recorder), some type of mixer board, and a computer with lowlatency soundcard made for pro-audio. I use the aark20/20 for aardvark that has asio drivers writen specificly for cubase. If not mixing to DAT, we mix to computer. all of are editing and arranging is done in cubase.
As far as midi controlers go, if you have a computer with midi, use cubase as your seq. and get a real 88-key weighted midi keyboard and do the sound editing through soft synts. get some good mikes some headphones and you good to go.
hope this helped