I view most recording engineers as a person just doing a job with very little(if any) passion(think of Homer Simpson sleeping on the job) regarding sound quality.
That couldn't be further from the truth. Read any recording engineer's trade mag... recording engineers are obsessed with sound quality, and getting raw emotion to turn into electricity on magnetic storage. Check out 'Sound on Sound' or 'Tape Op' to hear the language of the recording studio. You'll find there's almost zero overlap in terminology or focus. An engineer who claimed a digital cable "improved pace" would be laughed out of the control room before never being called for work again. Even the top manufacturers of recording equipment are quite resolute in saying that all digital interconnects are the same as long as they complete the circuit. Can you imagine an audiophile company saying the same?
The difference is, we put the obsession into tangible improvements. Yes, I absolutely could get a 1% increase in fidelity if I changed out the resistors in all of my equipment for Vishay Dale, and if avoided the DB25 interconnects and kept short signal paths. I could absolutely do it. But why spend my time on that if I can get a 50% increase in performance quality by getting the singer riled up and reminding him why he wrote the song, or picking up a coffee for the drummer who's feeling left out again? That kind of thing pays dividends.
The obsessive-compulsive stuff pays off very little in the end and, in my opinion, doesn't make an album more listenable. What makes an album transcendent is emotion, power, fragility... For very little money and effort, we can get to 99% perfect fidelity. It's the final 1% that costs millions and adds very little.
I never listened to Abbey Road and thought, "Man, if only they'd recorded this through 24-bit 192Khz A/D converters along unidirectional silver mic cables. Then they'd be on to something." No, all that distortion, 50hz hum, tape hiss, and background noise adds up to something beautiful.