I have to agree with that. Here's my feedback loop:My day Job.
If I didn't have a day job, I'd have the time to be able to replicate my income by engineering. But because I spend my income from my day job on bills, I don't have adequate equipment to do what I want to do. I can freelance in another person's studio, but I can't make any money off it because they don't really want to work deals with outside engineers (and have much more fancy gear than I really need). I might be able to find an internship, but I can't give up my day job to devote my whole life for a no pay job.
That's going to change this year...getting my tax refund on Friday, paying off the last of my credit cards, and I already set my direct deposit at work to shave off the "credit card bill" cash into a separate account so I can save.
Then my limitation will be the room...or lack thereof. So instead I'll be hunting down decent rooms to rent.
I've been there (on a 52 in SSL, not Master Control) and it just has always seemed to really push my needs quite a bit. I'd hit many many walls before I'd ever think that my lack of that kind of board is my limitationI think back to the threshold of a 52-input SSL like we had at Master Control. Tracking/Mixing sessions with 24-busses, 6 headphone mixes, etc. went smoothly. Lovely outboard gear like a Neve Sidecar, a rack of Trident A-range modules and a plethora of API and Pultec gear made things sound really good. We had ample supply of pretty much every kind of mic you could imagine.
In doing this now under different circumstances, the main bottle-neck for me is with computer power. Short of a full-blown HD system or some alternate program, what's the answer?
As far as computer power goes...have you looked at "other" hardware accelerated options?