eph221
This brings up a point about the goal of acoustic capture. In *old school* the goal was to capture the performance as realistically as possible. Now the goal is to make it sound as good as possible after the fact through production. What's your goal? Would you eq a stradivarius?
The record it, then improve what you're recorded afterwards process has been around since recording moved on from just a microphone and a recorder, be that wax cylinder, a disc cutter or a tape recorder. Treating recordings with eq, compression echo and reverb was pretty normal by the 1950s. Nowadays we've more (and sometimes but not always better) tools to hand, maybe the problem, if there is one, is we over-use stuff because we have it rather than because it's adding something good to the recording we've got.
And I strongly suspect modern engineers, pros as well as amateurs, are much more inlined to use digital editing technology to try and salvage a so-so recording while an "old school" engineer faced with the same track would say "do it again". We can replace bum notes with other notes from the same track and remove glitches and so on in a way that was never practicable in the days of tape when editing audio in that way required a lot of skill with razor blades and adhesive tape. Same applies to quantising audio to sort out timing problems, something not feasible to do in pre-DAW days.
Exactly what "realistic" means isn't always clear either. Someone I know refuses to have their very nice 18th century violin (not a Strad, made by one of the other Italian makers of the same period) recorded digitally, but insists on tape. Because to her ears tape is an "exact, perfect copy" of the sound of her instrument and "digital sounds thin, scratchy and nothing at all like it." That's having one experience of using one mic then splitting the signal to tape and Pro Tools at the desk, by the way. She says she insisted on no eq, compression or added effects/processing at all.
The tape sounds to me like it's pretty saturated, but to her it sounds spot on. The unprocessed digital recording does sound a bit more harsh than the tape, but I suspect that's because the tape artifacts flatter the sound, not because digital is inherently "unrealisitc".