Speed of hifi technology vs speed of recording studio technology

I'm fortunate enough to be good friends with a musician who has his own home studio here in the Cotswolds. He records (via a rack of largely Apogee sound processors) in Apple Logic Pro, running on a 2010 vintage Mac Pro. The latter runs from an internal sound card to Focal active monitors. 

I keep asking him why he doesn't update the Mac Pro - he deliberately doesn't connect this to the internet, as this is his workhorse on which he must rely, so can't afford downtime. He then played me a variety of his recordings of different genres, and the sublime quality of the recording and playback answered my question. No need. BTW, that was my introduction to the Focal brand - and in particular was struck by its beryllium tweeter, also used I believe in its domestic speakers.

So far as I can see (and I'm neither a musician nor a sound engineer), the thrust of development in studio technology in the last decade or two has been towards reducing the cost of the technology, meaning that what can be achieved nowadays for a given quality will cost substantially less than it would have done hitherto. My friend uses much vintage studio equipment (valve mics and processors, for example) to achieve as analogue a sound as possible whilst retaining the benefits of digital recording, so I suspect that this may be a factor in recordings made decades ago also being pretty damn good.

I've not had the pleasure of listening to the Statement - one day maybe, but as your strap line says "Don't spoil what you have with what you wish for!"

Some argue that the golden age of recording was the late 50s to mid sixties. Very simple circuits was with minimal processing was probably the reason behind such great sound. 

The irony of course is that it’s in the replay of these golden age recordings where we have made most progress by pushing the boundaries in what high end hifi replay can achieve.

In my opinion, with acoustic and particularly classical music, one of the most important things is to use a simple coincident microphone array (e.g. crossed cardioids or crossed figure 8s, possibly with an omni for better LF response).  Multi mic setups just add too much confusion, with multiple sound images of the same instrument, and with different timings - yeuch!

I actually don't agree that the older recordings are factually better.  There's no guarantee that more recent recordings will show better musicianship, or that better editing and mastering skills will have been used, but I believe that the maximum potential of equipment has steadily improved (I remember when I first had access to Elna Cerafine electrolytics and the Siderial polypropylene caps (one of the first high tension wound capacitors, and what a revelation that combination was).  The problem is that due to the human factors this potential is very rarely realised.

My most recent purchase that shows what can be achieved is the Ticciati / SCO recording of Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique (24/192 FLAC converted to WAVE).  Woven into the first three movements is a real sense of how love throws you off balance at a moments notice; something that isn't produced so well, even in the famous Colin Davies / Concertgebouw recording, due to the less focused sound it has (even though for it's time it was regarded as excellent).  On the other hand, with the Colin Davis recording the crowd gathering for the execution numbers in the thousands, where as Ticciati's crowd is merely in the high hundreds.  But the fantastic clarity and precision of the recording and the match to the acoustics of the venue clearly favour the Ticciati.