A question to the Sound Engineers out there

I must admit that I have found a lot of current music is mixed quite well, with excellent imaging and separation of performers - so they seem to be doing something right regardless of their studio environment.

I guess what prompted my OP is - I had just made some upgrades to cables that improved the sound of my system dramatically, but the level of venue acoustics on a couple of tracks now seemed a little over the top, so it got me wondering what gear the sound engineers used. They were obviously overshooting the mark.

When I looked at studio images, the setup on a great deal of them seemed to lack the "precision" we audio hobbyists might go to with our own systems.

That made me wonder how could they possibly create great sounding studio tracks that make you think that are actually recorded in a hall of some sort, without having a great sounding system that is correctly setup?

I guess there are some sound engineers that do go the extra mile for those tracks that sound really amazing.

Regards - Steve

  No doubt there are some wonderful mixes/recordings out there. It is a sad reminder however when you consider that, as mentioned above, much recording is adjusted for the sh***y car radio, or ear buds that the general public will be using to listen with. One of the tricks is to really compress and then highten the level of the recording to a degree that it captures your attention just by it's loudness and slam. sigh.

We are Investors in a successful Pac NW studio, we help fund the growing arsenal of microphones. I also have a analog and digital mobile rack, unamplified acoustic voices and instruments in reverberant space is my thing. Some great Church type spaces are amazing.

For the OP ? as others have said the general process is record w monitors in near field. Then mix and as Eric so aptly said might not even be stereo, might be 7.1
then Master it, very typically for the limits of the playback format... car radio or early barnspike phono might be the worst. To put some life back into poor recordings you have some audiophiles and music lovers go down a path of enhanced controls on the preamp - phase, blend, L/R swap, mono, and of course tone. see Cello preamp. Our resident egotist will dismiss that great bit of musicality and electrical engineering but that is just illustrative of how he thinks a particular recording went wrong. 
All manner of reverb to create ambience. The fat analog sounding tanks were viewed as near priceless. Digital became the way, things have morphed a bit. For a hybrid approach see some of the recordings of 2L ( Grammy winners )

for a pure analog experience see the Blue Note work of Rudy Van Gelder, sometimes odd stereo mix but usually drenched in the church like ambience but with some close microphones snap!!!

I had a home studio and recorded bands in the Portland, Oregon area for about 10 years from the mid 90's. I was a one stop shop - I did the recording, mixing, and mastering. Here are a few observations from my own experience.

Most well known mastering engineers have a high quality stereo setup that is equal or better than what most audiophiles have. This rarely exists in the recording studio. I was lucky to have a nice system to help fine tune my mastering but the mixing was done on a traditional setup with bookshelf studio monitors at ear level.

A good mastering engineer will listen to their work on a home style audiophile system, car stereo, and headphones. I can testify that it is really important to listen to the final product on a variety of playback devices - mostly to get the bass right. But it's also important to check your work on a cheap pair of earbuds.

It is my opinion that there is a level of detail that recording engineers generally don't hear if they aren't doing the mastering and checking their master on a high quality system. Their monitoring equipment just isn't good enough to resolve the last layer of detail.

The effect that leads to the perception of a big recording space is more often delay, not reverb. With the advent of digital recording and digital effect plugins the delay effect has been largely perfected with a variety of adjustable parameters and is an integral part of the sound of modern recordings.

You mean pre-delay right? ... an integral variable in modern digital reverb.