I came of age in a time when record producers had become just as important as the artists they worked with.
From hearing Phil Spector and George Martin records on AM radio in my earliest days, to the work of masters like Roy Thomas Baker, Phil Ramone and Alan Parsons in the 70s, to the trailblazing work of postpunk visionaries like Brian Eno, Steve Lillywhite, Martin Hannett, Martin Rushent, Mike Thorne and Hugh Padgham, my ears were showered with some of the greatest sounds ever put to tape.
These men were more like great film directors than simple sound engineers, and many became de facto members of the bands they worked with.
Those sounds trained my obsessive, detail-oriented brain to be able to tell the difference between these men's work, as well as the difference between a record made by a real producer and a knob-twiddler. But the explosion of MIDI in the 80s kind of went too far in the direction of total artifice, and that in turn inspired an equally unpleasant backlash.
"Inspired" by the studied stupidity of hardcore - especially the gutter-trash recordings of Black Flag and other SST bands - Eighties indie and grunge really pissed that pride in craft away, as making cheap and lousy-sounding records became a point of pride amongst the talentless rich college kids pretending they were working-class musicians.
And nobody made cheaper and lousier-sounding records than Steve Albini.
This was a sore point for me, since his Emperor's New Clothes approach - which was just a clever way of disguising his tone-deafness and lack of imagination - ruined a lot of records I would have otherwise enjoyed.