I'm always complaining that most commercial recordings sound no better than dog
droppings. I just heard a perfect example of what I so loathe and detest.

There's a Public Radio program in which the guest talks about the "Survival Kit"
they'd like to take to a desert island. The one running as I type this has
playwright Tony Kushner telling how he'd like to have the complete Haydn string
quartets.

They played a bit of the Aulis [sic] quartet cycle. The recording was not only
awful, but beneath contempt, both technically and aesthetically.

The quartet sounds as if it's a huge orchestra playing in a large, reverberant
space, but reduced to the size of string quartet. (I know that sounds
contradictory, but that's the way it sounds.)

The quartet sounds distant, there's way too much ambience, and the instrumental
timbre is so extremely colored that the instruments sound nothing at all like
what real instruments sound like live.

I could do better -- much, much better -- with a $250 Sony electret stereo mic
and a portable DAT machine in the players' living room.

This sort of recording is simply not acceptable. It is unmusical, unnatural, and
just plain musically ugly. It is OBJECTIVELY WRONG, by any standards.