"It seems to me that the difference lies in the quality of vocal recording and reverbs mainly.Professional tube vocal mikes,like Neumanns,cost serious money, as do good reverb units."

This is the thing though - in the 2-3 years I've more or less wasted trying to make home recordings I've found that the quality/price of microphones is immaterial if the room you're recording in isn't properly treated.

In fact, this was writ large the last time I went, ironically enough, into a recording studio. We used two Neumann mics. But it still sounded boxy and awful, and I can only put this down to the fact that the studio had only recently expanded its live room (but hadn't got their room treatment right). Also, despite it being a big room, the engineer set me up in a corner - something that struck me as fundamentally wrong but which I didn't question at the time.

I really think that difference between expensive microphones and cheap ones is massively overstated. Going from a budget condenser mic to a Neumann or Schoeps is the icing on the cake, but going from an average-sized living room to a decent acoustic space is the cake itself in my experience thus far.