Yeah, fair point, it's subjective but here it's a case of different things being important to different people. The album - SOTT in this instance - sounds the way it does and I've been listening to it for 37 years and wouldn't want it any other way, but it still evokes a feeling of dissatisfaction compared to other recording unearthed from the same era amidst the evidence that Prince just didn't care enough because he was too desperate to get the music out, and that attitude never really changed much until he died. It just wasn't a priority, but then other engineers came along, I mean, just one album later, and just captured more of him and his work.

A lot of stuff he didn't really care about that much actually made a massive difference to his work - Laura LiPuma's artwork, graphics, visuals and designs were all hugely important to those albums - and when he went off on his own years later, those things fell off a cliff and the art was worse for it.

As brilliant as he was, there were a bunch of things he really wasn't great at and other people very much improved his output.

As for sonics, I feel that all those albums he made with Susan Rogers have a low ceiling for getting the most out of them - i.e. they don't sound any better on a £50K system than they do on a £100 system - and if that was an artistic goal, I'd give up arguing, but because he outsourced caring about that to others, it feels like we missed out a bit. But we will never know, and that's ok too.