Have you tried it? I have. It's NOT a U87, but it's arguably close. And for what it does? It's absolutely worth the cost. "You can't polish a turd" (but you can sure make it smell better) and that's what the Antares does. And it absolutely allows people with lesser quality mics who know how to record with high resolution get much larger, bigger mic sounds that no possible series of tools or plugins give. This is how modeling works.
By your suggestion, you would then assert that I can't plug a strat into my computer, and use a modeling application and have my computer cause the strat to sound like it's coming out of a 1962 tweed? Because it absolutely does. And again, that's how the Antares system works. Modeling. The physical structure of the mic has been modeled, stored, and frequencies are applied to the model, "asking" the application what this same sound would be like through a U-87. And that's what you get.
The laws of physics caused my Prophet 5 to go out of tune every time the room got warm or cold. Oscillators couldn't cope. But my modeled Native Instruments Prophet 5 sounds exactly like it's hardware brother, but doesn't go out of tune.
So I'm not clear on what you mean by 'laws of physics' won't allow that. If you are suggesting that a computer can't model a sound to be like something else that it's not, you are very incorrect.
