IMO, a great recording captures the spirit of the performance, whether recorded live or an assemblage of overdubs that has been compiled to create the illusion of a performance. For me, an inspired performance can transcend the limitations of the recording medium and associated playback equipment-hence the reason for listening to something performed in the 40's as opposed to last years plain vanilla but technically state of the art re-hash of Beethzart Brahmkovsky's 3rd Trombone Sonate. In many cases, recordings are deliberately compromised as part of an aesthetic decision by an artist that wants things to sound a certain way that the listener may not be privy to. If Tom Waits decides that he wants the third song on his cd to sound like he's singing in his own outhouse, and the 4th song to sound likes he's been living in a damp airplane hangar for three weeks, few producers or engineers are going to dissuade him from doing so. These kind of decisions that may or may not translate to your listening room are indeed quite different to the "volume-wars" of recent decades, where decisions involving compression or limiting are made at the mastering level. In short, there are lots of ways to make what we might call a bad recording and I think that it's not for lack of talented engineers, but perhaps an aesthetic that differs from the way we would like to hear them reproduced when we sit to listen intensively. For most people, music is an accompaniment to whatever else they may be doing at the time. For us, it is an end unto itself.
