Ive been looking for a video I saw recently but I cant find it, of a session recording the bbc orchestra, their mixing room had loads of channels, loads and loads. Makes that analogue desk look tiny in comparison, I think if you added two more of those maybe even three, then it would be close
Well, my opinion is there's a lot of marketing in all this.
Like the big consoles make some famous band book sessions in that studio, but in the end they use about half the gear there. So the huge ass consoles have an attractive power, mostly... And i think even the best studios in the world don't have more than 80/96 channels consoles. Think Ocean Way, Abbey Road, Blackbird...
They could have one custom built if needed but they don't. They have enough attractive power as it is.
Spitfire they are overkill about pretty much everything... BBC SO being a good example. Even Hans Zimmer said the Zimmer library by spitfire audio was overkill. But, hey if you want to sell it you need to put more effort into it than did the competition. So it's again marketing.
And I give very little credit to all these engineers that get paid by plugins developpers to tell me how they absolutely need this and that to make decent records. If they reallh do, then they're not as good as they try to make me believe they are.
And Warren Felder probably uses hundreds of track but from the video, we can see it's duplicates of tracks. That I believe... But he's just too lazy to bounce it as it goes. Because he can. But if he had to, he'd bounce it. No difference in the final result whatsoever...
Well that's a pedantic post of mine.