Somehow I dropped into a rabbit hole on Discogs and stumbled upon Tom Coyne's credits list.

He was at work for almost 50 years. (he started in '72 and passed in 2017, if a post on his page is correct.)

What stood out was that many of the albums he worked on, specifically hip-hop albums, have amazing audio even though the producers and mixers varied among those albums.

I thought the mixing was the main technical aspect that determined audio fidelity but that must not be the case.

<--- Me when my head hits the pillow