Sound waves are delicate and fragile things. They need a medium simply to exist at all, and any variations or interference in the ether can change their whole character.
Ever since 33.3 LPs started coming out in stereo, we’ve had an obsession with recording accurate sound. You can spend anywhere from a few hundred to a couple of million dollars setting up just the right acoustic space, you can position the baffles and mics just so, isolate and eliminate residual hum…you name it, just to get the exact right sound on tape (or these days, disk).
Some folks are just obsessive, and they don’t realize one simple truth: real life is noisy, hissy and generally out-of-tune. You can get it all perfect, down to the last detail, but know what? 99.98794% of the general population is going to listen to it on sub-par equipment anyhow.
Picture your masterwork being dumped to a TDK AD60 and crammed in the tape-deck of an ’85 Fiero with a 10-watt system as the owner barrels down a gravel road. Continued...