Compression

Too much compression is bad. Not the type of compression that makes your music tracks into MP3's, the type that evens out tracks in the recording process. Sure, everything is louder but what you loose is dynamics. This is the main battle in the loudness wars you hear about all the time. Super compressed files sound nice and even but have no quiet parts and loud parts. Without dynamics, you start to loose...something...emotion?...feeling?...I don’t know what it is but it is the reason old records sound so good. They have dynamics. They are not so loud so you have to turn up your volume to hear all of the stuff that is going on in them and the really loud parts rock and the really quiet parts are amazing. I’m not saying that compression is all bad. It is especially useful on individual tracks where the performance was less that even. The real problem as I see it is that it can become a crutch. Work more on your performance and less on your mix and you will get a better recording. So often it is the other way around these days. I could go on and on...