You can do it digitally to a similar effect, but a lot of the times artists nowadays do not want it

There are some plugins n vsts that even have their own quirks of noises and tones that are unintentional or from time to time can produce "happy accidents" - when I mix songs for people they want those taken out so you have to manually automate it all

There is a give and a pull too tho, in my own music I like the "pops", "fuzz" and "static" happening in specific parts of a song with an undertone "base" in the background that blankets the whole thing start to finish

• But as a person that mixes for clients, to me, the biggest thing is that we don't have a dynamic range in mixes anymore that often - and again, this is usually requested by most artists. They either want everything "flatten" or they want everything blown out, so there is either no space for moving things around and have their own frequency and volume threshold to chill in, or on the opposite end you have moved everything to the same one "lane" that equals the flatten - thus no dynamics either way

• another thing is too, "go to" buses imo have became too common that leads to a lack of variation in mixes and record to record sounds. It's being mixed for convenience with slight variation rather than an individual song by song level. Which engineers of old and traditionally trained start almost every song totally clean from the ground up.

@op

Imo, anyways

Another thing I personally have a pet peeve is how much vocals are pushed the front nowadays especially in 2020s Rap where the beat and other sounds can sound they're playing through a phone speaker or sumn

Again, lot of artists want this, there's various reasons for why such as it's just a trend but also it pops more in mono speakers like phones and laptops and while scrolling feeds

Which also then, to my main point, also screws up the whole dynamic range of everything

Great thread. Been having this thought for many years now.

I always use this example to explain what is missing in digital recording ~ listen with headphones if you can. both are the exact same song / recording, yet one was recorded a***og and the other digital