A lot of that is true Eddie but it's also true that each one of these things are cumulative in a mix and can be the reason why your or any of our mixes don't quite measure up to what we want to hear compared to our favorite commercial stuff. Just give a very critical listen to the vocal reverb on a top commercial recording and then compare that to your Midiverb on one of your vocal tracks. Ignore the quality of the singing, just listen to the reverb tails. Huge difference. A pro reverb is clean, pristine, fades out beautifully while any $99 home reverb is noisy, grainy and a bit sloppy in comparison. Money can buy happiness sometimes. Along with the knowledge how to use that equipment. If you were to somehow find out what that studio used don't be surprised if it's that Avalon something or other that only cost four G's. If a $6-700 plugin can get close to that, awesome.

The thing with all the freebies is most are one trick pony's so yeah, you might need 20 of them to equal the presets in one good commercial one. Having all those freebies doesn't make much sense to me, I'll just buy one good one but remember to a lot of people messing around with all the free stuff is a hobby for them too. Most can afford to get what they want but they get off on finding freebies and seeing what they can do without spending anything so good for them.

Bob

Biab/RB latest build, Win 11 Pro, Ryzen 5 5600 G, 512 Gig SSD, 16 Gigs Ram, Steinberg UR22 MkII, Roland Sonic Cell, Kurzweil PC3, Hammond SK1, Korg PA3XPro, Garritan JABB, Hypercanvas, Sampletank 3, more.