What you said was true about 2001. I'm not so sure about 2007 though. For $1000 you could have bought 4 decent condenser microphones and an audio interface for

What you said was true about 2001. I'm not so sure about 2007 though. For $1000 you could have bought 4 decent condenser microphones and an audio interface for them. And for another $1000 a medium-high computer. Arguably not that expensive, considering that you probably already had a computer and you could split the audio hardware costs between the 4 band members (otherwise why 4 microphones) Software and plugins were indeed expensive, but there were plenty of free alternatives of decent quality. Reaper, FruityLoops were pretty cheap and quite good for the basics.