It's amazing how were all different I much prefer the sound of Beatles records, to me this this sounds like music by numbers made on something like Pro tools , Beatles recordings you can hear real instruments and how they are played, warts and all, this sounds like it was made by a computer with synthesizers, machines and sequencers, l really hate modern recordings, they are soulless, empty and baron, the bass doesn't even sound like a bass, Ringo's voice sounds like some kind of dreary mechanised robot, was he even there or was this recording made by a remote digital cyber producer using sampled everything ?
Having worked a lot with Pro Tools it’s certainly a real problem. I’d suggest a few things in particular. The ease of digital editing makes it much too simple to cut out and drop in to correct errors. This has in turn made people very sensitive to mistakes so that they won’t let any performance flaw go through. Even worse, you don’t need, for instance, to play a full rhythm track. You just do a couple of perfect bars and copy-paste through the song. That makes for a very sterile recording. Compare that to Lennon’s way of playing rhythm.
Similarly it’s easy to make every individual track perfectly EQ-ed and compressed etc even before doing a final mix. So you have all these perfectly performed and sound sculpted tracks before you start putting it together. Again that can be positive but also can make the final mix sound clinical.
Another factor, but one more dependent on the artist, is the ease of doing direct injection of instruments (guitars and all) and then putting room-style synthetic effects on them. Or using computer generated instruments or loops. This is often done as, unless you’re working in a good studio, you won’t have a properly acoustically treated space to record instruments through mikes. So it’s a boon for home studios but doesn’t have the depth of instruments recorded more traditionally.
