Can you help me understand why so many great albums (CD'ect.) Sound either out right bad, think nearly every thing YES recorded, or fairly poor? Why is it so diffacult to capture the sound quality of an average Telarc disc/Lp for example?
Is it really that hard to make a solid sounding recording?
That's actually a great question, and one I've grappled with since I engineered recordings in the 70s. Its certainly not the fault of the equipment; from the early 1950s it has been possible to capture the full audible range cleanly with the period microphones, consoles, and tape machines.
I really think that it boils down to the capabilities of the engineers of the time, coupled with the "need" and "perception" that the recordings had to be compatible and playable on the stereo (and mono) phonographs the record companies "thought" were typical.
Gradually after the 1950s it seems to me that the mentoring and education of recording engineers took a turn for the worse. I actually know an instance of a band which was fairly well known, who's engineer was just some guy who usually sold them drugs. They needed an engineer, and bingo he was it. True story. In the much earlier years, engineers underwent pretty extensive mentoring from older engineers, and the studios were more likely to be unionized, so there had to be some on the job education. Most of the really early engineers were old radio guys who knew their stuff, and the generation after them learned their craft relatively well.
There was the perception that master recordings had to be as "loud" as possible for radio play. Bass energy is the real three-headed hog of audio and having substantial bass presence on a record (especially of the period) just ate up a lot of groove space and yielded no real increase in the perceived "loudness" the record companies wanted and produced very little audible benefit on the vast majority of stereos at the time since most of them had no real bass response. Bass was therefore largely deemed useless and could be rolled off. So you had a large segment of master recordings which were almost all mid-range frequencies, and were pretty heavily compressed to boot. So you had a lot of really crappy mid-rang-y sounding recordings which had no real depth or life. The original multi-track master recordings might have actually pretty good sound, but the mixdowns for public release were typically compromised by lack of bass and heavily compressed.
How the recording you buy sounds is really a result of which master the re-issuers used to make the CD. If they had a choice an had lots of budget, they might actually go back to the multi-track masters and remix the whole thing. However this is costly and risks alienating people who are used to the way a certain album sounded. The Beatles could get away with this with the recent remix of Sgt Peppers, but it sounds different than the original did. Mostly the record companies now don't have a choice; they only have one master which has survived, and that might have been mixed with 60s and 70s vinyl requirements in mind, thus no bass, lots of midrange, and lots of compression. Sometimes there are only "EQ masters" which are masters equalized specifically for vinyl cutting, and these are particularly likely to sound harsh, since the act of cutting that master to vinyl rounded off those EQ settings.
A good deal (most actually) of the late 60s and early 70s recordings of bands like Cream, Led Zeppelin etc are pretty anemic sounding by today's standards. They could have sounded better, but the engineers either didn't know better, or they purposefully compromised the sound to cater to the sound system of the "man in the street". Even "better sounding" recordings like those of The Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and others tended to lack bass. That's just how recordings were mixed during that period.
Telarc had no such restrictions. They used minimal equipment, recorded almost exclusively classical music in the early years, and really knew that their sound was their trademark.