It’s a sticker, took the faceplate off and did my best on cutting it out. Love the sun and of course Willie!
JBL is good but also super annoying with its audio timeouts. But it works and it’s multitasking with my shit music and real music!
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The thing that really impressed me about the Arturia FX was how they worked the alternative ways people used to use them as much as the expected way. For example, the Grampian spring reverb is more desirable for the way it overdrives and saturates than it is for its qualities as a spring reverb (which are great, don’t get me wrong!). I was delighted and very impressed to discover that the Arturia version works in much the same way (not that it I can compare it to the hardware unit, as I’ve never been fortunate enough to use one, but it works in my music as a saturation beast just as well as a reverb)
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…if it comes down to the most essential sonic ballpark “only”, but still be able to achieve seriously engineered audio results, two solid inputs, two solid outputs, a proper midi controler of ur choice, one mic, a pair of good cans and/or some proper monitoring and of course, a halfway actual laptop with nothing but a next gen modern/common daw is ALL it really needs…
anything in addition is nothing but ur personal taste/fetish and/or pure luxury…
might help u, might support ur workflow, can add some xtra fun and further personal motivation…but is not essential…
as kraftwerk once said, last century, it’s more fun to compute…and even given the fact that now, in the 21st century, at the dawn of the information age, each 'n everything is computed and not that funny anymore, but never the less, some code actually is all it really needs…
even finest top notch analog hardware is all ending up in nothing but rows of numbers…naked information that “just” needs some energy to become valid…for all kinds of frequency design…
like always…that’s good and bad “news” at once…perspective matters.
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not sure if it’s 100% relevant but, partly to be “tidier”, partly because I needed to sell most of my gear and partly out of laziness, I came up with this constraint where I ended up having a one or more “project(s)” per box. so I constrain my setup to a single box (ST for techno and ambient, DT for techno and house, or OT for house and chillhop) + 1 stompbox (EHX Platform as a cost efficient “glue”) + a headphone amp. i don’t “combine” boxes at all. occasionally i use my laptop for some source sample editing, but i even try to avoid that and handle all my audio editing/effects stacking in OT with plenty of resampling. i don’t even have a proper sound interface anymore so Overbridge comes in very handy (even to record OT performance into the computer).
I feel like I flourished thanks to this constraint. I tend to get lost in “setting things up” quite a bit, for me it’s usually an “endless” loop with almost zero output. I also get lost a lot during the “mixing” phase. now I arrived to this conclusion (which is valid for me, but perhaps not for someone else): it’s worth releasing “anything” that sounds decent, rather than “nothing” that sounds proper good. it’s not like my 14 followers on Spotify will care 
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yeah I’ve been considering this approach a lot lately. slimming down to something like “one of each.” one modular, one poly, one mono, one sampler, one drum machine, etc… but the closest I can get to slimming it down to that is “two of” and even then it’s still easy to make exceptions for certain items… 
and by that point the feeling is, as you say: fuck.
I think pairing things down is a great idea as well, really focusing and learning a piece so you know it in and out. I’ve also toyed with that idea.
Except for samplers. I need at least 9-10 hardware samplers for some unknown reason.
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For all that I’m happy to embrace the minimal approach to hardware that current situation necessitates, if I had the space and money this would absolutely be me 
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This could, uh, technically be true while also filling a room.
Anyway, I think I am going to try to pare down to two “islands”, then probably decommission one of them later. I know I waste too much time seeing if item A can do the same sorts of things item B can do.
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Interesting thread