Dem is some cool hats, daddio.

love Joan Armatrading

Ken Scott is one of the old school geniuses of audio recording in my book. I really enjoyed a little back and forth he did on gear sluts a few months back. Glad he's out to share his wisdom...take advantage boys and girls - he can cut through more crap in a single quip than most high profile engineers.

Indeed. I do think good engineering is valuable mind you. But it's a matter of getting bad sound *out of the way*, rather than being a thing that's good to listen to in and of itself.

Actually, having read Ken's book, it was real obvious that he always made painstaking attempts to capture the best possible performances and sounding tracks that he possible could.  In fact many of the artists would comment in the book that he would keep making them play take after take until he felt he had the best they could do.  He also would spend a considerable amount of time getting the drums mic'd and sounding just right.  In fact, several drummer quotes in the book said that they had never heard their drums sound that good in recordings, as when Ken tracked them.

However, Ken mentions several times in the book, that he fully understood that it was the song and the artist that would sell the record, not just his production.  For example, the first time he was approached by America to record their album, he basically said that he was not interested, because he did n't think they had their chops together yet.  There were several artist he names where he felt he did some of his best work, but the albums did not sell at all.

So in my own way of thinking, I think my answer would be that it is important to strive to be the best at what ever you do, be it musician or engineer.  However, if weighted, the song and performance are still the most important part of the equation.

There's room for both sides. It's nice to listen to something really well captured and with tasteful enhancement to make it sonically more interesting. Something, to me, like Natalie Merchant's Tiger Lilly or Nora Jones' Come Away With Me, those are all very good songs and very well captured and produced. That's one whole type of way to go about it and it works really well, and probably the exceptional capture does add something to it, even if not consciously to the non-technical.

But there's also the other side that works well, too. Probably each end of the spectrum works best for some types of music as compared to others. A rougher vibe is often very useful for some types of music, it's not even a compromise. It may be a conscious choice, e.g. Cobain's decision to make the music fairly primitive to offset the fact that he knew he was singing very 'pretty' melodies a lot of the time. And lots of indie stuff is purposefully done in a not overly polished way because it fits the aesthetic (though it may be that that aesthetic came to exist because most indie artists can't afford to do more and it just  becamse the accepted sound of that sort of music.)

A really good engineer should in theory, at least on the good days, be able to get a good capture without unduly affecting the vibe or spontaneity. And some music just requires more thought, on both the band's and the engineer's part. Not everything is a three minute pop tune that can be put down in one shot, whereas a punk band may well only be able to get the right vibe that way. Some music benefits from time and care, Pink Floyd being a fairly canonical example for me.