Hi all!
Why does one recording have great sonics and another doesn't?
The $1M Question.
As an ex-recording engineer questions like this always elicit a huge grin.
Not at you! No insult intended, but this is one of those questions that cannot be defnitively answered, although everyone seeks the answer.
There are many factors that go into the final sound, quite apart from the artist!
1. We have a forum devoted to discussing the pros and cons of often minor modifications to equipment in our Hi-Fis and talk of huge differences. However, we rarely talk about the source! A typical recording will have already passed through between 5 and 100 times more gear in a studio than in your hi-fi before it even hits CD. Gear is important. Note much of the new "pro-audio" gear on the market is not as good as AKSA stuff. I won't name names, but it's true.
2. Gear is a tool. There are good and poor craftspersons using these tools. Engineering is a mixture of art and science are there are many that do it well, precious few that do it REALLY well and plenty that do it really badly. From choosing the right tool, matching it to other tools and applying it properly.
3. The acoustics of a studio play a huge role in final sound and this is the most important (and in amateur setups the most overlooked) part of a sounds. Good acoustics are hard and expensive to achieve. Volumes have been written on this (see F Alton Evarest's "Master Handbook of Acoustics" for a brief introduction) and the best way to do it is still not known. That art is blacker than hi-fi.
4. Quality of the mastering and pressing process is important. Major variable here.
5. The synergy of all the parts can produce unexpected good and bad results. Some luck enters here.
All this before you even stick it in the player!
In short we could write a large book on this, suffice it to say the process is multilayered, complex, synergetic and several orders of magnitude more complicated than tweaking a hi-fi.
This answer is probably not satisfying, so here is my 2c worth:
1. I consider myself a musicphile as well as an audiophile. There are performances I love where the sound is not too hot. I also own recordings which are purely there for their amazing sound.
2. Get to know good labels where the directors have a philosophy of recruiting quality artists, use the best gear and employ the best technicians. Examples of such labels are Chesky, Telarc, Teldec to name a few. Find your own list and read mags on this. I will often buy a CD on the basis of its origins.
2a. Start a list of artists, producers and mastering engineers who seem to have similar individual committments, and follow their work, eg I have rarely heard something bad mastered by Bernie Grundman, Bob Ludwig or George Massenburg.
3. You can buy some cheap studio gear to retard your hi-end setup so that it makes bad recordings more tolerable. For example, the Aphex Aural Exciter is a studio device which is (injudiciously) used to "enhance" the sound of flat tracks. Patching one of these in to your hi-fi can obscure the more objectionable parts of a bad recording. There are plenty of cheap toys like this out there. I un-plug it to listen to good recordings.
4. Learn to revel in what you systems reveals even if it seems to reveal flaws in the recordings. This is a fun exercise. Sometimes.
Anyway, there's a start. I would be most interested to talk about studio techniques and recording industry practice. Also I would be quite interested to start a canonical list/database of good recording labels/companies/artists/engineers etc.
<end rant>
