Thomann had (still have?) this thing called "stompenberg", where they put up some mechanical switching system so that you could play audio files through the actual pedals in the system, and turn on the knobs / parameters.
In the recent years some smaller businesses have started to offer outboard gear in this way. You upload some stem, and can process it through their hardware remotely, and get back the results.
No way! My friend and I were half joking about building that as a sequel to realtuner. If nothing else, it'd be a great excuse to buy more gear.
This is cool except that the only ad for this I've come across so far was for analog summing. Remote or not, that concept (going out of one's way to theoretically have something more pleasing than digital summing) always smelled like a scam to me. Like ok, maybe a sample rate a hair above what Shannon/Nyquist demand can't do digital summing with all the right IM distortion of the missing supersonic content or whatever, but 192kHz ought to solve for that! So is it something else to be gained via analog summing?