Interesting thing, though, I never bought DX7, but mostly Roland, Korg and Ensoniq synths.
Yeah, good old 80s when you had to sell drugs or family, or body parts to be able to make music.
It was not at all better. The thing is you can easily produce great sounding music with much *much* less money these days. But what's interesting is that if I had a wage like this in the 80s, I'd look for another job so I could afford *anything*. All the stuff you needed was more than a 1000 euro, from synths to mixers and FX. You could easily spend 50000 euro just to assemble a basic home studio that in all honesty doesn't compare to what you can have today with just a computer, a decent audio interface, decent monitors and a few mics.Good old days. Editing samples was such a PITA and time consuming even over SCSI and if you had to do it over MIDI... you had to be a devout to endure it.
But at least noone was concerned about loudness, just a good sounding mix. I personally didn't know what loudness is until early 2000s. You just recorded, mixed it, mastered it and voila - there you go. If it sounded bad you mixed it again. I can't remember that anyone before 2000 asked for a louder mix. It was just "does it sound good or not?" My speciality were "mastering" to a cassette tape recorder, an Akai GX-65. Expensive shit at the time.It's interesting to compare stuff, now and then, isn't it? And then some troll comes around and says "your plugin is noisy, down at -120dB, can we have an option to turn it off?" You my friend doesn't know what noise is... and how nice it is to hear it, actually. If you can hear it at all at -120dB...
All my favourite recordings have a noise floor of, I'd say, about -70dB and dynamics [crest factor, DR] of about 14dB.