On Thu, 26 May 2005 07:01:39 -0400, in rec.audio.opinion you wrote:

IME its often a lifetime of deceiving themselves. For
example, I've worked with a lot of musicans who strongly
prefer to work in rooms that blur their work and thus
conceal their technical errors. Their addiction to these
rooms has, right before my eyes, degenerated into personal
power plays to preserve dysfunctional performance spaces at
the expense of the stated function of the rooms.

Clearly not all musicans are like this. I've also seen other
musicans gravitate toward rooms that are more neutral and
readily adaptable for a broad range of functions. There
seems to be some kind of "big fish in a small pond" effect
with some people. Musicans that work together in larger
groups can be pretty agressive about striving to produce and
identify high performance.

One would think from this that Arnold was something more than someone
who records his church choir, organist and maybe a few youth groups.

And its not necessarily their fault. The infrastructure they
work in is not always that good.

I guess some rooms in the church are better than others. And then
there's the part of of the "infrastructure" that must be maddening at
times - the recording engineer.