UA Apollo 8

[Andrew Tarpinian]

Anybody on the UA train? Thinking of upgrading my motu 828mkII to the Apollo 8 or 8p and have a couple of questions.

Wondering if I will see a dramatic increase in the quality of recordings and monitoring just because converters are better now a days vs 10+ years ago? 

I will mostly be using line signals from keyboards and such, but like the idea (for color) of being able to run them through the pre-amps using the Unison tech with plugin in the Console (and printing the audio.) Because of that I'm thinking about the 8p with preamps on every channel. Am I being silly? For line level signals would there be an auditory benefit to using the hardware preamps in conjunction with the plugin in Unison mode vs recording a clean signal and using the plugin just on the channel in the daw (besides resources)?

Also what happened to the plugins in your daw when you are not connected to the unit, do they just bypass?

Thx,