I am a firm believer in "both kinds of DX": live and after-the-fact
capture analysis.
Whenever possible you should use a mix of the old-school and
new-school methods.
Advantages of live DXing:
* You can use webstream, remote-receiver, and shortwave parallels.
* You can use high-Q tuned antennas rather than broadband. In two
situations this is the way to go. One would be when you have very
weak signal conditions and not enough space for a broadband antenna
of sufficient sensitivity. The other would be when you are in an
urban situation where any broadband antenna of sufficient gain to
hear DX is going to present locals at such high levels that the
receiver will create spurious signals.
* You can use a phasing unit to target the specific "pest" affecting
the frequency on which you're actively DXing at the time. It takes
a very good antenna system (e.g. physically-large array) to deliver
much better than a 25 dB null in a broadband sense. But narrow
bandwidth nulls of better than 40 dB are easily had with a Quantum
Phaser (or similar) and a pair of different-pick-up antennas (e.g.
loop vs. whip, loops at right angle), or with two similar-pick-up
antennas spaced at least 50m / 164 ft. apart.
Advantage of after-the-fact capture analysis (Perseus, Excalibur, etc.)
* During a "hot" opening, a single top-of-hour capture gets you a
whole medium-wave band worth of ID's. This would take much more
time to accomplish with live DX sessions. Optimum conditions may
have gone away by the time you're even halfway through the band
doing it live.
At US/Canada East Coast beach sites around local sunset, two
top-of-hour captures (+/- 3 min.) can get you an amazing amount of
choice DX. Same is true for West Coast around local dawn. And, if
it's auroral, admittedly a fairly rare occurrence in recent years,
you'll be busy all night on tops-of-hour as well as on the
half-hours for the Venezuelans.
* You can repeatedly replay a given target, trying AM, synchro AM,
USB, and LSB modes; various IF bandwidths; notch filters et al. On
live DXing you have less time to figure out the optimum receiver settings.
Since you typically won't have webstreams and shortwave to assist
you on after-the-fact analysis of medium wave capture files, use the
periods BETWEEN the tops-of-hour (:00+/-3) and bottoms-of-hour
(:30+/-2) captures to do live DX, making sure to avail yourself of
things that are only feasible when DXing the old-school way. You
can still have TotalRecorder (or your other favorite audio recording
tool) running during the live DX activity since you won't want proof
of a breathtakingly rare catch passing you by. What you find out
during the between-captures live DX will feed into antenna-aiming
etc. decisions you may want to make before the next capture session.