I'm a fan of vintage recording equipment, I have a dbx 163 here in my studio plus a tube preamp, an 80's ART SGX Studio Edition analog effect rack that I got for a low cost, a Tascam 32 reel to reel recorder and I recently bought an 70's analog 8-channel console with patchbay to connect all these effects processors.

just check this little bad boy out

It's ironic when we see people saying that these equipments are obsolete but after they buy their sophisticated things we see them using reel emulators, compressor emulator, tube emulator, etc.

You can have the best of both worlds, for example I plan to build my studio using the analog console as the main instrument/vocal input, it has an equalizer and gain control which makes the premix much easier, after that the effect processors and the console gives me the ease of sending a direct mix to the reel-to-reel recorder while simultaneously sending the 8 independent channels to their respective 8 independent digital recording channels of my digimax D8 connected to the computer via ADAT and recording all the processed audio previously with the analog processes in pro tools at 48 sample rate.

the great thing about all this is that most of these teams have found them at very low cost in sales of used equipment or exchanges of musical instruments on the web, I have been lucky with many of these devices but I still have a long way to go , I'm determined that I will do everything old school.