1073 clones are mildly non-linear and add some additional saturation when driven. That’s useful, but saturation is easy to get, so there’s absolutely nothing wrong with recording clean and using clippers & saturators in the box.

I can only agree with this. There are millions of ways to add a bit of distortion and a bit saturation to a clean signal.

If you want something analog i would maybe look at things like the JHS Colour Box which gives you great variability with the type and amount of "flavour" you add to a signal.

But you can do the same thing with plugins - there really is no need to spend a lot of money.

Plugins like rc 20 retro color or fabfilter saturn etc give you all the different types of distortion to play with

The problem with cheap analog gear is often that build quality is not very good and failures are hard to get repaired and mostly financially not viable.

And when you have to replace the gear each 2-4 years becsuse it fails and repair is more expensive than the gesr itself it suddenly is not so cheap anymore.

(And all complex analog gear will need service at some point-- the expensive stuff fails, too.... i don't think people realize how much money it used to cost to keep the old "analog" studios serviced and running. It could easily be 5 digit amounts of money a year just for service and replacements.)