If that came from an interview with Eddie, it is my understanding is that he rarely speaks the truth about how he records things. Another thing about Eddie's sound on those records is the fact that he used a light switch dimmer before the cabineet to reduce the output voltage being fed to the speakers. (Don't try this at home, kids. Always use a Variac.) I find that microphones tend to respond better to lower volumes, which is partly why I like to record smaller amps. My theory is that a dynamic moving coil can only move so much.
I'll give two anecdotes on the topic (sort of):
Billy Sheehan comes in for a session to add some bass tracks. He sets up 2 SVT 8x10 cabinets in the live room. We've got an MD409 on one of the sixteen speakers and get a killer sound. I never understood why he thought we would need the extra speakers for a recording session, when both cabinets had an identical sound.
Story number two involves having a shitty engineer come into your room and blaming his failures on the gear and the asst. engineer. This guy is tracking Hi-Watt through a Marshall 4x12. They have this thing on so fucking loud that when I was two floors above the neoprene floating tracking room, I could feel the floor shaking under my feet. I went down to check on their session, and among the three or so mics he has on the cabinet, is one of my matched pair of Neumann UM57s. I was trying to control myself not to impale him with an Atlas stand, and I told him that they really had that cabinet too loud. My second said that the control room level was so loud that they were distorting my 1031s. The funny thing is that he kept bitching that I did not have my NS10s up.
The end to this story is that they asked to get a reduced rate on the session because they said some of my pres were not working and that I didn't have my drum kit all set up and mic'd for them so they had to mic the kit themselves! Mon dieu! I told them that I agreed to leave the drums set up, but nobody ever asks me to mic a kit without specifically telling me what they want used. Then I discussed the mic pres with my second. Apparently, the "engineer" wouldn't let my assistant put attenuators on the mic lines, so that when the mic pres sounded distorted with the signal from a 130+ db 4x12, it was OBVIOUSLY because the mic pres were defective. The funny thing is that when I popped in on the session, I could hear the pres the guy wound up using running out of headroom, and it was like he never noticed that they too were distorting. Apparently, he was such a savvy engineer that he must have known how horribly attenuators degrade the signal quality! Where do people find fine engineers like this?
Their manners were bad, too. They didn't buy or offer my second any food, or even ask if he wanted to buy some himself when they ordered pizza. For their crimes, I get to talk shit about them in this forum.