What makes the biggest impact on the production?

After reading the article and understanding that he's Talking about Music that is pretty much created by the mix engineer and not a Compentent band that can play together. Yeah he's absolutely right.

This is obviously heavily dependend on the style of music.
There are complete genres of music, where there might be no recording involved at all. This must not even mean, that there is not musicality or artistic achievement involved. E.g. electronical music. A guy like Aphex Twin for example does produce music with own aesthetic and artistic quality, no matter if you like it or not, and it is like a direct composition to synthesizing to mixing approach which doesn't even need any classical type of recording at all.
And of course there are all kind of productions inbetween.
This is not bad in principle, it is just a matter of technical possibilities, what you want to achieve aesthetically, and last but not least a matter of budget, too.
Of course, you can use digital editing, "liquid audio", to pep up mediocre artistic performances, and it is done alot, and at this point, the editing and mixing producer gains much more influence on the final product musically, than he ever could in the analogue era...
It is just the way it is.

Oh f*ck. Hahaha, yes, i know, what you mean...
The mainstream pop genre...

Make no mistake that it is still all about arranging, performing and recording. Polished turds aren't selling.

I would say the players. I don't mean that as a cop out – but I do believe they make the biggest difference.

You know....he's right--but not in the way he's saying with all the sound replacement and making performers sound "like virtuosos"....

It's more like....it's the thing that if it's not done at a professional level, you are FUCKED. Which is why any studio I ever worked in, the senior engineer did a majority of the mixing. And this is in his "old days of tape".

You can track well enough that you can mostly push the faders up and the mix is mostly done....that is both the goal....AND....not making the mix less important. because those same well tracked tracks can VERY easily be pooched. And are--nearly every client who sends me scratch mixes, they're some kind of amateur unbalanced horrible. In fact, the ones who send a kind of "just push the faders up"--are the best ones, because the tracks are solid, and the "mix" is simply boring, not tight, and unrefined. But, the ones who try to mix--compressing this and that....EQing this and that....putting in delays and multiple reverbs....I promise they're horrible.

And they can't be saved with mastering....AND they were tracked properly.

If you want to take a rock band and neuter them into sounding more "pop"--you can't do it in mastering. You can't do it in tracking (much)--because they're a rock band....what makes it polished and more balanced to the vocal/drum/bass....pushing up the keys...the thngs that smooth that is the mix balance and EQ. Look at the last Nirvana record--teh singles were mixed by NOT steve Albini--and sound like a different record. He tracked the whole thing. Same person mastered the whole thing. But, the label had the singles remixed.

For that reason.

That said--his reasoning is not solid. But, he's a mastering engineer. What he's REALLY trying to communicate is that when he gets a bad mix, he can't magically make it sound great. Duh. The Audiophile thing--is because for 40 years, you mostly HAD professional mature experienced mix engineers and producers handling the mixing. So the only difference you will EVER heard in Aja are different masterings for different formats.

Actually Dave was a really good recording engineer and mixer before he went into mastering.

Still it's really all down hill from out in front of the mike.

Production crutches like overdubbing and effects can only turn train-wrecks into mediocre competency.

When recording was expensive, everybody had to work really fast. People who were incapable of recording and mixing an entire album in a single day couldn't get a record deal before the mid '70s.

If the musicians are good enough there's really no reason you can't do it in a day.

I keep trying to get across to people that there is no reason to not record old school today and now we have incredible tools we can fix any distracting glitches with. The whole reason for '80s methods no longer really applies.

Or they only have to spend one day with each other. I can't imagine spending days on in in the studio...Second guessing everything. It would be exhausting.

I'm still confused on the stuff popmann was talking about concerning just using a cheap mixer for true no latency headphone cues. Aren't I doing that already with the Apollo and Console?