I have been recording music at home since the days of 4-track cassette recorders.
When Digidesign introduced the first USB Mbox, it seemed like the best thing in the world. I bought one immediately, and a Mac Powerbook to run the new ProTools LE on.
My band started trying to record an EP of original songs on the powerbook with protools... but, the computers were not yet powerful enough and the early USB1.0 interface was wonky.
Audio dropouts and crashes happend a LOT. My band mates were not impressed, and they got very frustrated. Pretty quickly they suggested we go back to tapes. Eventually, we just gave up on the idea of us doing "studio" type recording.
I sold the mBox on eBay shortly after.
Despite the problems with the computer, we liked listening to recordings of the band playing. So, I dug out an old Minidisc recorder I had lying around and bought a microphone for it.
Each week after rehearsals I would move the minidisc recordings to my computer and burn them to CD and give to the band the following week. Some of these single room-mic recordings came out.. not too bad! They allowed us to hear our mistakes, and we got much tighter listening to the playbacks.
But the mixes were not always good. If someone moved the mic, or changed their volume, we'd get too much of one thing and not enough of everything else, and some weeks the recordings were awful and not useable. We needed a better way!
I had read a lot about the Yamaha AW16G when it first came out in 2002, and finally I picked up a used, like-new, one on eBay for about $600 (they originally sold for $1100, so this was a deal!)
Now, the band could record stereo drums, guitars, bass, and vocals to separate tracks and create decent mixes!
The recording console sat next to my drum kit and recording everything. It was not delicate like a laptop. It never failed! And it was SO powerful! The compressors, EQ, and effects were amazing! We ended up with some tracks good enough to use as live demos!
After that band broke up, I went back to recording my own demos at home using the AW16G. But by now I was obsessed with standalone multitrackers, and over the next couple years I bought and experimented with other units by Yamaha (AW4416), Roland (VS-880EX), Korg (D16, D1200), and Tascam (DP-02).
Of course, I also kept drifting back towards computer recording as the computers, interfaces, and software seemed to improve. And they did! DAW recording now worked pretty reliably. Plus the samples, MIDI, editing and everthing else were amazing... But I realized just how much I REALLY HATE recording in front of a computer screen!
The AW16G just always felt right. So, It stayed and all other units were sold.