576i (or 480i in North America) is less expensive and higher quality than 720p or 1080i? In which universe do you live?
My understanding of what he said is that for the same price analogue is better than digital, for digital to be better than analogue then you have to spend more money.
For live mixing you can probably pick up old analogue equipment cheaper than you can pick up new digital equipment. Part of that is that so few people want to do live mixing these days, because doing everything off line is cheaper while back in the day it was off line that was expensive. So old stuff is worthless and new stuff has to make a lot of money to recover the investment.
For off line then digital is better and so cheap that it's not worth considering analogue.
