audiophile rockers

I was at a festival in a big ampitheatre years ago and the sound was just crap all day so muddy in the bass and shrill in the highs you couldn't understand the lyrics. Tom petty and Neil young were the last to play. Somehow magically the whole PA system was fixed for both of their sets. They sounded great and the Neil young show in particular stands out as one of my favorite live shows I've seen.

I did a bit of recording in my time and I came to the realization that I would rather have a great monitoring system than front end gear. If you can't really make sense of what you are hearing how can you make the right choice on what to do with a mix?

It's realy not necessary to master recordings with Maggies.
There is a substantially large volume of the various studio monitors to master a sound even more superior than with Maggies even back 40 years ago. It's not even audiophile equipment has a large factor of the good recording quality. It's definitely something more and my example is...
Frank Zappa not only sounds great but the music and musicians can realy hide the recording imperfections. Seing the movie "Apostrofe" made by his son Dweezil makes me believe that his records are brushed with excellence of professional mixing of large bands independed of an audio equipment used.
Another example of recording art is album Nunsexmonkrock by Nina Hagen:

Nunsexmonkrock totally grinds. It makes fun of just about everything, from the church ('Antiworld') to drugs ('Smack Jack') to religious obsessions ('Taitschi Tarot') to pompous futuristic declarations ('Future Is Now') to alien life ('UFO'). But even if you cannot make out the actual lyrics - and I sure can't most of the time - the very sound of the music is enough to drive you wild. Nina gets even more production-concerned on this album, which usually means featuring tons and tons and tons of vocal overdubs; sometimes there's as much as four or five Ninas vocalizing at the same time, each one in a different key and a different voice, yet in some perverse manner these overdubs merge together real well. Oh gosh, I mean, it's just my friggin' opinion.

So recording is more an art than quality of the studio monitors and equipment.

The Grateful Dead's 'Wall of Sound' was forty eight 300-watt per channel McIntosh model MC 2300's. Bob Weir still prefers it on stage and at home.

Hi all ! I read somewhere that the highs on Katy Lied was flawed due to a bad adjustment on the eq , or something like that . Also , that Becker and Fagen never listened to the final album because of this .

Whow how cool is this info.