Why recordings sound so bad

What do you guys think?

Yeah...

Two things...

1. Tracking(/recording) engineer was an entire role in itself that required expertise; recording in a studio with high quality microphones, acoustics, through high end preamps, converters and mixing consoles; vs Billy in his echoey bedroom with a $79 dollar mic through his USB port or Focusrite Scarlet listening on his gaming headset in his cracked Fruity Loops and his dl'd 'cHriS bRowN mixing TemPlatE'.
2. These kids/today people have become accustomed to this shit low quality sound, and start expecting to hear flat lifeless recordings with this brittle glassy overly harsh high/mid. Even the autone sound we hear today is reminiscent of the phasey tone of 56bps mp3s downloaded from those file sharing sites played out of phones back in the day.

When I'm getting trackouts for low quality artists the above is consistent. And also their requests of sound. They basically want it to sound shit. So you have to try making it sound shit without it sounding shit. Or battle going against your better judgement to give the client some poor quality shit that they request.

Well it's also that garbage in = garbage out. If your original sound source is crappy, then you'll have to do all sorts of FX gymnastics to get it to sound better.

But also, like you said, anyone can make music with low budget stuff. There's nothing wrong with recording and mixing at home, especially for a hobby, but if you want to get that real professional sound, that's why recording studios still exist.

The other thing too is that everyone is trying to do everything, when in fact it shouldn't necessarily be like that. There's recording engineer, then the mixing engineer, then the mastering engineer. But now at home you can do all of that pretty much. It's both good and bad.

Trust the professionals!