I was thinking about this thread yesterday, as I went by to visit Jason Falkner at his studio. Jason, of course, was in the Grays, and had JJP mix portions of his two solo records for Neglektra. I had told him about the thread and about my story with how Jack's mix with just the 24 track, the 8038, some EQ and him playing the faders killed over the final album version. We agreed that having too many toys and too many options can be a bad thing.
He had once told me that he didn't want to produce himself again, because he plays so many instruments brilliantly, and plays everything on his albums himself, he thought the songs got muddled in too many things going on, etc. The he played me a track he just did that was classic a Jason Falkner demo. I have always loved his demos, even the really lo-fi ones. It sounded so great, even though he doesn't have the most amazing rig, he knows how to get really cool sounds from what he has. He doesn't need to have every mic pre or compressor under the sun to get a sound that works for the track. I mean, even the tom sounds were really cool and he was just using SM57s. I told him that I think he should continue to produce himself, but use no more than 16 tracks this time. LOL.
This, of course, goes back to what some of us are talking about. Use some discipline when you track and envision the final mix. Pink Floyd records and the way they made their records are a really great example of this. In these days of unlimited tracks and being able to automate EQs in PT, etc., it gets to easy to see, let's throw everything at the wall and see what sticks in mixing. God bless the poor mixing engineers who decide to eliminate things when we producers overindulge the artist or get bogged down in our own indecision. Nick Launay was telling me that they tracked the Semi Sonic record with all kinds of production, and Bob Clearmountain made it a guitar, bass and drums record. Nick thought that it actually worked really great like that. Anyway, I digress ... as usual.
BTW, thank you for mentioning sacrificing signal to noise. I've often wondered about the wisdom recording everything with faders at 0db for that very reason.