Badly recorded songs that people love anyway: what listeners actually notice

Plenty of successful records are technically poor and nobody minds, which is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. What survives a bad recording and what does not.

What listeners forgive

• Noise, hiss and room tone. Frequently read as character.
• Imperfect tuning and timing, within limits. Often the opposite of a problem.
• A narrow or odd frequency balance, if it is consistent.
• Cheap microphones. Almost nobody can identify one in a finished mix.

What listeners do not forgive

• An arrangement where everything happens at once. This is the actual difference between amateur and professional far more often than gear. If three instruments occupy the same range simultaneously, no processing rescues it.
• Uncontrolled low end. The single most reliable giveaway of a home recording. Untreated rooms lie to you below about 200Hz, so mixes made in them are either boomy or thin everywhere else.
• Levels that jump, so the listener reaches for the volume. This ends attention faster than any tonal problem.
• Vocals that are hard to follow, whether from level, diction or masking.

What that implies for spending
The order that matters: the performance, then the arrangement, then the room, then the microphone. Most people buy in exactly the reverse order.

Room treatment is unglamorous and does more for a home recording than any equipment purchase at the same price. Even a heavily furnished room with something soft behind the microphone beats a bare one with an expensive microphone in it.

A cheap check for the low end: listen on several systems including a phone speaker, and listen in a car. If the balance holds up across all of them, the room did not lie to you too badly.