That’s classic cost benefit analysis, and there are plenty of examples in audio of trade offs where the simulation is sufficient (or more flexibly applicable). Just because the cost is high for a given application doesn’t mean something has no value. Bringing the cost down is the classic engineering conundrum.
Let’s take reverberation as an example:
- Folks used to record in big rooms for big room reverb. It’s nice, nuanced, and comically impractical. Place mics around the room and capture the effect live, but even your close-mic’d take is going to have the room in it.
- So some studios started piping audio out to a speaker in a secondary room and piping a mic from that secondary room back to the board. Boom. Configurable reverb, at your service.
- But you can’t take it with you, so spring and plate reverb devices showed up.
- Enter computers and DSPs, where simplified reverb models could be applied in real-time.
- And then on to impulse capture and convolution (e.g., pop a balloon in a church, record, convolve).
- And then beam tracing and other techniques approaching physical simulation (but orders of magnitude less computationally complex).
And all but piping to a second room were used in making the libraries of sounds that we sold.
However, throughout history, each of those techniques went through times then the cost benefit balance led to using some other technique(s) to achieve the desired result. That didn’t render those techniques worthless just because money hadn’t traded hands. It’s why economists describe markets as mechanisms for price discovery. What something had sold for is a way to understand value, but it’s not the sole definition of value (even monetary value)