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Almost always (can't remember last time I didn't). And I have very little patience for drummers who poo-poo click tracks. Not coincidentally they're almost always the ones with meter problems.

It's true your room is too small to be able to transform into something special, acoustically. But if you have sleeping bags, big down comforters and other, VERY heavy fabrics, you might gain some bass trapping if you can layer those in corners, with a void behind them.

I assume you'd get a considerably darker sound than cymbal mics on top. This might be a good thing for live performance, but I'd really miss the sound of wood/nylon on brass.

As some of the later posts on this thread have suggested, two nearly identical performances are a great way of doubling tracks (especially vocals). It does require a singer or player be able to churn out identical performances (which a good player/singer should be able to do), but the end...

The DynAudios are the awesomest of your choices, although you're right to be worried about buying used. Mics and speakers have a significant mechanical component that degrades with use (degrades heavily with abuse).

If the OP deliberately wants the lo-fi aethetic of 4 track tape (and that would be the only justification, IMO), why does (s)he want to dump it into the DAW world? It doesn't make sense, unless of course, the OP has some Studer 1/2" 4 track machine running at 15/30 ips and a bitchin' front end...

Sounds like you found the culprit. Otherwise, I would have advised that you record something direct (to bypass your room, mics and preamp for inbound signal), then record a Virtual Instrument (to bypass your room, mics, preamp and A/D for inbound signal). This would reveal at least if it was...

DynAudio BM15As. Expensive, but detailed as hell and loud, if necessary. I picked them because, more than any other speaker (except for Focal Twins with dual Focal Sub-woofers at $8K for the rig), they made my favorite commercially produced material sound incredibly good, while my...

IIRC, you record lots of detailed classical music, like cello. In such cases, I would assume clarity and faithfulness would be all important. However, in the pop/modern music world, there's a lot to be said for coloration, including in preamps. I've gotten a punchiness with API preamps that...

And I'm not sure where Ethan is coming from with his no coloration from a preamp comment. If the OP is money conscious and facile with a soldering iron, he/she should consider some of the boutique kit preamps (Seventh Circle, Hamptone or Baby Animal). Seventh Circle has Neve clones (that many...

Start off with output at full blown, input at minimum, move input up until you get a healthy signal going into to your A/D conversion. See how that sounds, then start playing with the output, and compensating with the input and see where you go...

To oversimplify: DI with amp sims is the easiest way to get good guitar sounds. Recording a nice tube amp is a harder way to get better guitar sounds.

The OP sounds like the perfect candidate for hiring out a professional studio. If you can't afford studio time, you probably can't afford the equipment to approximate it. Then there's the whole learning curve and the desire for instant shortcut knowledge...

and recording the whole band with one or two mics in the room will mean the acoustic properties of the room are vitally important. Even the best gear, set up for room mic'ing, in a crappy room, will sound band. What are the room dimensions? and what are the walls made of?

And of course, you can buy a vintage Neumann U-47, an original Neve 1703 preamp, feed it through a UA1176 "F" series compressor, into a Cranesong A/D converter, ignore the gain structure and guess what? Hiss and noise will abound.

Normally, I encourage folks to experiment and see how crazy ideas sound. In this case, DO NOT DO IT

Check your gain structure. Each analog component should be set to feed the maximum pre-distortion audio levels to the next stage in the chain. That next chain will attenuate the input (thus reducing the noise floor as much as possible) until it sends its maximum pre-distortion audio to the...

Huh? If the audio card, aka A/D interface, is doing the conversion of audio to data, then it's very much a variable in sound quality. Otherwise, why are folks spending thousands on Apogee, Aurora and Cranesong equipment? the A/D conversion process involves analog signal processing technology...

Good Grief! I'm an old enough fart to have seen the Beatles debut on Ed Sullivan's TV show in 1964. But even I can appreciate Billy Corgan's Smashing Pumpkin guitar sounds. If any of us on these forums could get 10% of the way to capturing his amazing tones, we'd wet ourselves. He did tons...

GIve Matt's way a try, but I would caution against keeping the amp volume down. I think every amp has its sweet spot, most are with a healthy amount of cranking. I think the most important point is to back off the distortion. Not necessarily shimmery clean or anything, just half as much as you...