XLR interconnects?

Yes music was mostly dumbed down in quality and content over the years.
The more way you could alter the signal the better it must be was the way things went in most studios.
Remember the Aphex Aural Exciter?
It was suppossed to be the best thing you could process a recording with since sliced cheese.
But that's what it was ,sliced cheese.
It is long gone.

But a lot of other toys filled in the gap.

The old engineers had to rely on getting it right the first time, and so did the musicians.
It wasn't about fix it in the mix.

Not so today.
You mention the early Beatles recordings sounding lousy.
That's not the recording, it's the pressings.
Have you given a listen to the Beatles Love cd ?
Modern tech has really done a great job here.
Yet most of the stuff was recorded on 4 tracks and looped together.
But Sir Martin was a master, as this cd illustrates.
If it wasn't good on those old master tapes to begin with this cd would not sound as good as it does today.

There are many more examples from Rudy van Gelder that show how a good recording can stand the test of time.

As for most people listening to boom boxes, I believe they are now buying turntables and the very same vinyl records I am talking about.

Lacee - Boom box people don't listen to vinyl but they influence recording quality (as well as MP3 people).

I do have The Beatles "Love" but it's remastered CD. It has nothing to do with pressing quality. It just simply means that somebody altered the master tape by cleaning it up (improving). I have no idea what was improved (other than obvious lack of noise) but I can tell they sound much cleaner and more transparent.

If you really think, that there was nothing wrong with original recordings and only pressing was deficient then why CDs made of the same material sound poor (compare to CDs made of later songs) and why early songs were mono? It wasn't Beatles desire to record mono - it was just poor state of recording industry.

I agree that today we often do gimmicks instead of putting money into the process. 200 feet of XLR cable should be of high quality but my 0.5m XLR IC runs above $2k retail and asssuming $1k per foot for the highest quality cable means $200k just for one mentioned 200 feet cable. No studio can survive this. Stereophile "reference" recordings are made with high quality cables (and their names are listed).

I have a vast collection of unique and hard to find CD's. Most are classical and jazz but they do put to shame many recordings from both the past and present (vinyl included). Great recordings are made by people who care and have an ear for the music they are recording...the technology used seems to be unimportant in many cases.

Dave - we talkin' correlation here - exceptions always happen.

What I am saying is that great recordings have been made from the 50's on up thru to today. Great recording engineers make the difference, not the technology. I have 16bit recordings that are amazing and I have the latest SACD's that are rather conventional sounding. Some tube recordings from the past are amazing, while others sound like crap. I will say that mainstream recording practices are quite abhorant...sound that is compressed, multitracked from here to the timbuk 2 and all of it put through mixing boards that can suck the lifeforce out of even the best source.