[1] I sometimes do wonder why a great deal of music (especially popular stuff) sounds so poorly recorded / mixed these days. Especially if you conciser the capabilities of modern technology. Honestly, barely anything new that I know beats pink floyd from 45 years ago. ....
[2] But I do wonder why so many artists that have so much money have them recorded in what sounds like they can't afford proper recording equipment -
[2a] or the electronic sounds just sound like that in the first place.
1. There's several reasons for that. Probably the most significant reason is that's what consumers have inadvertently demanded! While the demand for music recordings is higher now than it was 45 years ago, the amount of money consumers are willing to pay for them is just a tiny fraction. A lot of music is consumed for nothing at all, on YouTube for example and even when consumers do pay for it, they typically pay only a few cents to stream/download it, much of which goes to the technology industry (the streaming/download services) rather than to the music recording industry. As the revenue from recordings sales has decreased, so has the amount of money the recording industry is willing to invest in making them. It made good sense to invest $1m in making an album (and millions more to promote it), if you were going to make several tens of millions in record sales but it obviously doesn't make any sense if you're only going to get a few million in return. Floyd and other bands would spend months, as much as a year or more, in a world class studio to produce an album but world class studios are very expensive. Today, artists typically produce an album in just a few weeks or potentially longer if much of the work is done in relatively very cheap project/home studios. Today's basic recording technology is both better and far cheaper, enabling project studios to rival world class studios in this regard but NOT in regard to the wide variety of mics, high quality recording spaces or the engineering knowledge and experience to employ it all to it's best advantage. And, even when world class studios are used, the relatively tiny amount of studio time allowed forces compromises that would have been inconceivable/unacceptable to Floyd (and just about every other successful group in the '60's, '70's and '80's).
2. Because they don't have "
so much money" from selling recordings. They have "
so much money" from being celebrities (from celebrity product endorsements for example) and from live tours. Today, albums are effectively just the promotional material for the actual product (celebrityhood and live tours), while in Floyd's day it was the other way around, celebrityhood and live tours were the promotional material for the actual product, the albums.
2a. Going back to point #1, that's another contributing reason. The use of sounds/samples that are so highly processed they are barely recognisable started decades ago but proliferated in the later '90's with the falling revenue, the demise of the big commercial studios and the rise of the home/project studios. Genres/sub-genres evolved that were largely or almost entirely dependent on these types of sounds (EDM, hip-hop, drum & bass and others) and because these genres grew in popularity at a time when "the writing was on the wall" for the traditional recording industry, these types of sounds were inevitably subsumed by other artists and eventually, the mainstream. A good example was Amy Winehouse, effectively a traditional jazz/blues/soul singer but whose productions incorporated several stylistic elements of hip-hop production.
I used to believe i could hear more differences than I actually can. It wasn't just the file size that made me put all my CDs on my FiiO x3 as 320kbps Mp3s, it was that i could hear no or little difference. With a really good CD player, listening to it direct could well have a noticeable difference with my headphones compared to an Mp3 on my X3 in that case, but I think that will be more related to the quality of the device than the format. I don't think I did thourough enough testing such as ripping a disk as a wav or flac and listening to that and the same disk as a 320kbps mp3 on my X3. I almost wonder if I would notice a difference there now.
That's pretty much always the case, even with considerable experience and formal/professional training! We've ALL fallen into the trap of making fine adjustments we're sure we can hear, only to find out later that we couldn't hear them at all. I've certainly done that and I've never heard of any other professional sound/music engineer who hasn't. The necessity of not wasting time and many years experience doing it day in, day out, help the best engineers to avoid it most of the time. Consumers, even very serious hobbyists, really don't stand much chance but careful controlled testing (ABX for example) eliminates the issue and the more you do, the more you learn about what you can actually hear and the more you avoid the trap, but no one always avoids it, which is why science only accepts double blind testing/ABX.
G
