I would like to comment on one thing that Hifibri said - while I agree with pretty much all of the rest of the post, I would disagree with this part: "Recording studios can and usually are 'warm', dead maybe, designed to lack reverberations to control the sound, but not usually characterized as cold. Great pains are taken to control studio acoustics. "
Great pains are usually taken indeed, but almost never to make it "warm." In fact, quite the opposite - the engineers want the room to be as dead as possible, as they want to totally control the sound not only of the room itself, but even more importantly (and objectionably, to us musicians), of the actual instruments/voices. This is true not only of small studios, but also of the big studios in Hollywood and London. Some very famous musicians truly detest what some engineers do to their sounds in the studio, including in the top movie studios.
By the way, this does not necessarily mean that the resulting sound is bad; but although it may have cool effects, and the recording itself made and edited and mixed very well, it usually has very little to do with what the musician actually sounded like (although for the vast majority of pop singers, for instance, this is actually a very good thing, and they love it).
Also, this is not to say that the studio cannot be made to sound more like a real performing venue - once I had the pleasure of playing with an orchestra I was in with Georg Solti in Abbey Road studios (it was a one-off rehearsal in a training orchestra), and most of the deadening treatments in the room were pretty much removed for the purpose. And this is sometimes done for big budget films where the score is an even more than usually important part of the film. But what I am saying is that this is never done for the overwhelming majority of studio recordings - if they wanted it to sound like a concert hall, they would record in one. Usually, the room sounds so cold and dead that it is actually hard to hear your fellow musicians - the sound dies almost as soon as it leaves the instrument. Of course, normally there is a click-track going on in earphones you are wearing anyway, so there is very little sense of ensemble in any case. And of course, it is usually a much smaller ensemble than a full orchestra, but that just gives the engineer that much more control over his production.
Bryon, some of this also relates to your Recording Accuracy/Event Accuracy thing. Obviously, I am almost always much more interested in the latter than the former, with the type of music I perform/listen to. But if one listens either entirely or at least primarily to electronically produced music, then all of the above is nowhere near as big of a deal (if not practically irrelevant!). It is certainly a hell of alot easier for engineers to manipulate the sounds of electronic instruments exactly how they want to.
Great pains are usually taken indeed, but almost never to make it "warm." In fact, quite the opposite - the engineers want the room to be as dead as possible, as they want to totally control the sound not only of the room itself, but even more importantly (and objectionably, to us musicians), of the actual instruments/voices. This is true not only of small studios, but also of the big studios in Hollywood and London. Some very famous musicians truly detest what some engineers do to their sounds in the studio, including in the top movie studios.
By the way, this does not necessarily mean that the resulting sound is bad; but although it may have cool effects, and the recording itself made and edited and mixed very well, it usually has very little to do with what the musician actually sounded like (although for the vast majority of pop singers, for instance, this is actually a very good thing, and they love it).
Also, this is not to say that the studio cannot be made to sound more like a real performing venue - once I had the pleasure of playing with an orchestra I was in with Georg Solti in Abbey Road studios (it was a one-off rehearsal in a training orchestra), and most of the deadening treatments in the room were pretty much removed for the purpose. And this is sometimes done for big budget films where the score is an even more than usually important part of the film. But what I am saying is that this is never done for the overwhelming majority of studio recordings - if they wanted it to sound like a concert hall, they would record in one. Usually, the room sounds so cold and dead that it is actually hard to hear your fellow musicians - the sound dies almost as soon as it leaves the instrument. Of course, normally there is a click-track going on in earphones you are wearing anyway, so there is very little sense of ensemble in any case. And of course, it is usually a much smaller ensemble than a full orchestra, but that just gives the engineer that much more control over his production.
Bryon, some of this also relates to your Recording Accuracy/Event Accuracy thing. Obviously, I am almost always much more interested in the latter than the former, with the type of music I perform/listen to. But if one listens either entirely or at least primarily to electronically produced music, then all of the above is nowhere near as big of a deal (if not practically irrelevant!). It is certainly a hell of alot easier for engineers to manipulate the sounds of electronic instruments exactly how they want to.