There are bad recordings, but a lot of them are brilliant and historical. Bob Dylan can be whiny and distant, The Beatles can be bright, and old Louis Armstrong stuff can tear out my eardrum. But I would never give up listening to those old, naively mastered albums. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Criticism should be tempered by context. The modern albums though, the ones playing into the loudness-war, made by producers and mastering engineers that should and probably do know better, when they excrete something with a waveform that looks like a brick and sounds like a construction site, that should result in a public tar and feathering of Death Magnetic proportions each and every time.
