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Originally Posted by bbrown
Great comments Doug.
This is certainly true in my experience. With my ridiculously simple set-up, there are just not that many variables. Yet I can get very different results when I thought everything about the set-up was identical. Perhaps it's slight changes in mic angle, who knows. I get a wee bit suspicous when folks are too scientific about recording.
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It's definitely an art, but there are a lot of "scientific" principles to it, and an understanding of the core concepts can help. I've lost track of how many people I've helped who had the phase of one channel reversed, for example. There are some concrete things that make a difference between good and bad recordings, and you can mess those up no matter how much or little you spend on gear. Also understanding some basic principles of testing, like "only change one variable at time", as well as being aware of our human biases and perception challenges can make it a lot easier to understand and evaluate what's happening and make consistent improvements, even if you're trying to be "artistic". It's really easy to say "I'm not getting a good sound, I must need to buy new gear". Maybe, maybe not. Approaching things a bit analytically can help answer that with necessarily buying lots of things to randomly try.
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Your mention of humidity is interesting. Anecdotaly, just based on what I have observed, I am convinced that humidity changes the transmission of sound waves and there is a noticable difference in clarity based on changes in humidity.
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I just threw that out as an example of one of the many variables we don't have under tight control (as in "only change one variable at a time"). But we know that humidity affects the speed of sound, and perhaps more importantly, it also affects our guitars, so it's one possible wild-card when you're trying to nail that last 0.01%.