engineering mistakes on recordings

It's why Donald Fagan and Steely Dan records sound so good. They pay attention to details and understand the subtleties of music.
If you listen to current/popular music, you just have to lower your standards.

I just get upset with crappy sound
Alan

Much of the time the recording engineer is not the mix engineer. Also, some producers/mix/mastering engineers have lost their hearing through high sound pressure levels and the end result, while the master may sound good to them, is a sonic mess to the rest of us. I cite early Husker Du, Superchunk, Guided By Voices and other so-called "low fi" bands as sounding like crap, when they really didn’t have to.

But then of course, there is the (Ringo: "one more time") Re-Mastered (!) market for us all to enjoy and spend our money on! Hmmm...

What irks me is that engineers have problems with the technique of recording band members solo. For years, it's been commonplace to record each instrument separately, yet many engineers cannot create a natural soundstage.
  It takes proper mic'ing, then a good ear for mixing. For some reason, many modern rock and jazz recordings do not have any space between musicians, and an unrealistic positioning of the instruments; i.e., a jazz drum kit is not 10 feet wide, also if the bass player is on the left side, we should hear the sound from that side with spill-over to the right side.
(I know sometimes the producer is calling the shots).

 IMO, it's a lack of the fundamental skills of music recording. The best engineers started as assistants to an experienced recording engineer.

@stevecham I think Husker Du's production got progressively better once they left SST...but then you have people that don't like Warehouse or Candy Apple Grey cause they thought it was over produced...

I would toss MBV in there as well as wasted production...they were obsessive and hired/fired quickly, put out Loveless (a fantastic album) with poor quality.

I was listening to a live album recently, I can't remember the title at the moment, but whoever mixed it changed the locations of the different players on every track.  A little too much creativity I think.

Unless it's a blatantly experimental, clever approach, I prefer a natural, realistic presentation of the instruments and voices.  +1 for Steely Dan.

Most of the young engineers today have had no experience recording a whole band, group or orchestra at the same time so when they go to mix the individually recorded instruments they have no feel for what that shoul sound like. When I started in 1963 we were still recording to mono so everything was done together. Nothing like that happens anymore. Also Protools made many people engineers who shouln't be
Alan

@ahendler 
My point exactly. They never learned the fundamentals.

T-Bone Burnette's Truth Decay LP was originally on a small independent label, and the last song on side one ("Driving Wheel") had a false ending; after a brief silence, the song started back up again, playing through a fade-out. When the album was remastered for LP release on a different label, the mastering engineer cut off the song at the false ending!

+2 for Steely Dan. Except for The Royal Scam (IMO), all their recording and production values were first rate across their catalog. And, TRS is still one of the better produced pop albums compared to most.

TRS is my favorite. Please elaborate on the flaws.