Seperating performance, the 'song', and audio quality...

[NathanEldred]

I notice that when I have people in for studio tours, sometimes if I don't have an example of their sub-genre of musical style they don't fully understand the capability of myself or the studio. As an example, a couple of years ago I had a 'Christian rock band' come in for a tour (which was standard vocals, guitar, drums, bass)...

As examples, I mainly had punk rock, metal, and country to show them (which were all guitar, bass, vocals and drums)...I got the gig, but initially they couldn't see how the quality of our studio could tranlate to their style of music. I put this down mostly to inexperience, mainly in them not having a lot of production/studio experience and listening more for 'feel' than pure sound quality, and them not being able to make the jump from one genre to another, even though the other genres had the same exact instrumentation.

So my question here, is how many of you are able to seperate the performance, from the 'song' (or genre), from the pure audio quality? If you hear an out of tune guitar but the tone of the guitar is great, do you think it's a bad sounding guitar (or ruins the production in general)? If you hear the singer giving a perfect and energetic performance in the genre of music that you play or enjoy listening to, but it sounds a bit grainy or harsh does it still seem like 'great' audio quality because it's not being analysed in the same way (from a purely engineering standpoint)? Etc, etc.... Please discuss.