Recorded audio today sounds fantastic!
Unfortunately, most people have never heard a modern recording.
The music and the recorded sound tend to be intertwined, too.
A truly modern recording makes use of the historically unprecendented dynamic range of the medium. Which means, in general, no, or very little, compression.
Highly compressed recordings are contemporary, but they're not modern. In fact they're just that boring old mid-century
mass-conformity/dictatorship/genocide shit, embodied in sound. Think about what a compressor does. Pushes down, or straightup kills in the case of a limiter, the stuff that sticks out, so you can "bring up the average". Sound familiar?
Don't get me started on autotune.
Not being extreme about this, actually- compression happens in any society, the question is motivation. I suppress the scent of my underarms with roll-on on occassion, out of consideration for others. And there are offenders who are just asking to be on the recieving end of some serious hard limiting, I'm not against that.
Of course, there are artistic reasons for heavy compression- for example, you might want to express how shallow your emotions or life experiences are with a limited dynamic range, or your fear and timidity of making definite statements by shyly ducking down those attack transients. That's cool, it takes all kinds.
Yes these truly modern recordings sound great.
Lots of acoustic instruments of course- you've got this flood of inexpensive decent mics, old and new, all these musicians dicking around with them at home. What are they going to record? A Marshall stack in the kitchen? No, they remember how they used to play the sax in school, next thing you know they'e all over the place in modern music.
It's refreshing that 4/4 is more the exception than the rule- it took a long time for the sexual revolution to really sink in, but now you've got this kama sutra of waltzs and 7/8s and such, not so much one thousand subtle variations on the missionary position.
Equipment is highly portable, so you hear lots of different strange rooms of course, and you've got all the convolution impulses of rooms floating around too.
What's worse? Well, there's no snapped-to-grid and often no click in modern recording, those techniques belonging to a former age and contradictory to the true, non-linear, power of a DAW. So you get a lot free-form stuff and very loose rhythms and it can swing too far.
Of course no modern producer goes near autotuning because intolerance and conformity aren't hip, love and diversity are, so tuning can run pretty damn loose, a matter of taste.
Probably the biggest real difference is visual, though. Because modern recording is all about creativity and musicianship, and no modern producer wants to be associated with the lick-the-ass-of-the-military-industrial-complex vibe of MTV, you tend to get quite a few frankly homely middle-aged folk in the bands, poorly dressed to boot. Another matter of taste of course.
-Bobro