As we have had this discussion before I will add the same type of comment I have made in the past. This question can't be asked without also asking "What is your end game?" Do you need a CD out that shines like a perfect diamond so people will come to see you on your upcoming arena tour? There aren't but a few people here who are actually in that kind of situation. You don't need that level of engineering to play your favorite Hank Williams tunes down ta' the Iggles club.... If you have no distribution channels and dozens of rabid fans to buy 50,000 of your CDs, why waste all that money? I put out one CD and that was a bucket list thing for someone who was bogged down in cover bands his whole life and always thought he was the next Lennon/McCartney as a writer. Of course I am not. I am just some chump in Ohio with marginal talent and a massively inflated ego. I was happy to sell the 45-ish units I sold, and lost what to me is a a fair amount of money doing the thing. That in itself is relative, as losing a few hundred bucks on CD that really only mattered to me may not mean anything to someone with a mansion and his choice of Bentleys to drive down to where his yacht is docked. True fact is that I could have had George Martin and Geoff Emerick work on that CD and it wouldn't have been any better than it was. While the material mattered to me because they were stories of my life, real songwriters likely would have to stifle the laughter if they heard those songs.

In one of Tom Bukovac's videos he talks about doing a session and telling Bryan Sutton "I don't know. I just don't like anything I am playing." To which Sutton replied "Tom, THE SONG SUCKS!" That'd be me.

Another story involves some girl singer who recorded a CD in a friend's home studio. I did some work on it for him and happened to be at the house when she called to say she was picking up her CDs which had been delivered to the house because he wanted to hear the mastering. She came in, he popped a copy in, she listened for about 4 or 5 "A&R listens" of maybe 30 seconds on each song, shrieked "Oh my god! I SUCK!" threw the whole box of 100 CDs into a trash can and ran out crying. I don't remember if she even got out the door before we fell out of our chairs laughing. I mean she was TRULY awful. And then he told me how many takes he had her do on every song, and that those were the best of the bunch! And that started me laughing again.

So, a pro studio isn't necessarily a magic potion. You can suck for free at home or for hundreds of dollars per hour at Muscle Shoals. Inversely, you can also shine in a home studio. For free.

So yeah, for "real" bands, studios have a place. Otherwise it's a digital hole in a building into which you pour money.