Don't mean to cause any eye-rolling, but to follow up on aspects related to Jon's first post, and what yates just posted..
I think it's the most analog sound to date that I have gotten out of digital.
I don't know what 'analog sound' or what 'digital sound' sounds like, unless those terms are describing distortions which are more common in one medium rather than the other. I usually don't want any of that, and want to record without any of those kinds of distortion if possible. Technically I'm changing gain and also frequency response as a reflection of the response of the microphone I'm using, which are the only 'distortions' I want at that stage.
The more useful dichotomy to my way of thinking is 'clean' non-distorted sound, verses various types of distortions. And the distortions fall into two useful categories: bad sounding and pleasant sounding. Both are distortions of the clean signal. Things like limiting (to avoid hard clipping), compression, mild-transformer saturation introducing low-frequency harmonic distortion, and other things can sound good, but I'd rather record the cleanest signal I can and impose those kind of subjectively pleasant distortions after the recording has been made. That's not to say that imposing pleasant sounding distortions in the recording chain by using good gear with pleasant sounding distortions is bad practice, just that I have more control over imposing them later on a clean signal if warranted.
Identifying bad-sounding distortions by ear is easier. It's more difficult deciding if the aspects you identify as 'good-sounding' are due to a clean distortion-free signal chain or some sort of pleasant distortion.
Apologies for no specific input on the subjective qualities of the distortions or lack of them through the saxs.