Kinda reminds me of the expression, "you can't polish a turd."
Except that a turd can be polished. I wonder how many recordings exist that are, to some extent, turd polishings that we will simply never know about but dig anyway.
Alot of this going to be down to personal taste anyway.
That said, I can think of a few recordings of great players where the engineer blew it. IMO, some of those classic Deep Purple recordings sound like total ass. And it certainly wasn't as if those guys couldn't play or had bad tone. Even relative to other recordings made in that era, the quality is subpar IMO.
I say that with this statement in mind. I think those LPs (if it's "In rock", "Fireball" and "Machine head" that's being referred to) sound fantastic. Unless you listen to the Portuguese pressings.....
It seems to me that, as has been the case for the last century, technology drives the tastes of contemporary mainstream music. The impact of synths is a lurid example of this...from the cheesy Vox Continental organ, which Ray Manzarek beat into submission and many bands lept to incoporate, to the uber glossy FM synths of the 80's. Digital sampling had and continues to have, a huge impact. Prior to the mid 80's, if a song had strings on it, you could damn well count on them being actual strings arranged by someone that had some knowledge of orchestration.
Today, IMO, songs are better described as assembled. Yesterday, they were written.
Good writing/performance will trump superior assembly to a knowledgeable listener. There's still some great songwriters working, but the songwriter to assembler ratio is getting a bit wide.
Recordings have always changed as the technology developed. And people, being what we are, have always used the current, new and existing technology in ways that the inventors of said technology did not forsee. That's partly what has made music of the last 100 years such a boon and a bane ! Who would've thought that a tape based sampler meant for families to play on sunday afternoons at home would become one of the staple sounds of British psychedelia and nascent progressive rock ? And that much of the character of the sound and playing technique that the players of it developed, derived from the fact that it was moved about from gig to gig to studio to rehearsal space and constantly went out of tune because it wasn't in the corner of the family front room?
As for songs being assembled, The instant Les Paul put into practice multitracking, assembly became
part of songwriting. Hence the difference between writing and arranging a song and the
recording of it. When many songwriters in the recording age's early days 'wrote' songs, whatever they had in mind was rarely the final recording. But as bands and artists became more self contained, penning their own stuff, the studio became more and more a part of the writing and arranging process.
I don't see assembling as a negative. It's 'technological arranging' that many many bands and artists have utilized for the best part of half a century.
I'll be one to disagree. It's the room BY FAR that is the biggest difference between pro sounding recordings and crap home recording. The player doesn't have anything to do with the quality of a recording.
It would appear from the responses thus far that there are actually a number of different 'secrets', depending on who you talk to !
