Native_bon said:
Very much so, it's quite pointless, no harm in using tone controls if necessary. *music2*
Some people visualise the recording process as a straight wire with gain between a couple of microphones and the cutting head. They envision that a perfect hifi would recreate that 'one version of the truth' which was the live performance perfectly in their living room. This fallacy is an unachievable goal, and is as much perpetuated by the hifi 'scene', eg hifi magazines and the marketing machines of the manufacturers, as it is by the punters' own naivety.
If only they had an inkling of an understanding about what really goes on between recording the individual instruments and hearing the final result mixed and mastered, then they would realise there's no such thing as one version of the truth. What they're actually aiming for is a blind target, because a perfect hifi (which doesn't exist) would not inherently reproduce the sound of the real instruments but instead could only ever precisely replicate the sound the mastering engineer created, which as Rumsfeld would say, is a known unknown.
Maybe some simple recordings of solo instruments, singer-songwriter with a guitar, or jazz quartets etc are as close as you will ever get to what these folks naively think happens. But even then, the producer and mastering engineer will still have tailored the sound to suit their tastes and the brief.