To clarify a bit, I think that, by "artificial", you mean the boost does not correspond to how the human voice actually sounds, which is true.

But in another sense, it's not artificial. It's a natural side effect of the physics of how microphones work. In building microphones to be directional (favor sounds from, say, in front), they've also made it where the amount of bass picked up is heightened when the mic is very close.

So NPR is artificially (with a high-pass filter) removing a natural side-effect (of directional mics) to avoid getting artificial-sounding boomy bass.

Also, this is one of those accidental invention things where what was originally a side effect has turned into a valued, essential feature. Like guitar amp distortion is part of the electric guitar sound. Or like how resonator guitars (Dobro, National) were invented to be louder but now people like the tone.

This is called the Proximity Effect, isn't it?

He says later on in the article that they try and get people in the studio to not talk directly into the mic but across it. So in some ways they are trying to correct for the issues caused by strong directionality before they get to artificial things like signal filters.

It is so clear that getting a clean analog signal up front is worth a lot.

The article just said it's not left up to the studio.

I don't know if you’ve worked with modern audio software but its truly a tangled stack of complexity, incompatibility, license management, etc etc. It can sound and work great once set up, but its touchy stuff when it comes time to make changes, update the OS, etc. as we all know software is notoriously buggy which is far from ideal in a live scenario.

Software pipelines only began to get into radio some 20/25 years ago. NPR started in 71

Also software can't do magic (and you aren't processing each microphone digitally), you want to be your signal to be as best as it can as close to the source as you can make it to be.

Plugins - software for audio programs - are available but audio engineers are famously persnickety.

Further down the audio path it eventually makes sense to digitize, but if you didn't have the HPF in the mic your noise floor will be worse.

They gave all the equipment to a pack of monkeys for the night. Anything still working in the morning was certified as reliable.

Thanks to near constant use of auto-tune I think most people realize pop vocals are thin.

Edit: clarification to remove accidental contradiction. I initially ended with "... I think most people realize that," which would have essentially translated to, "Most people realize that pop vocals are thinner than most people realize."

These plugins really exist to save time for large studios, not make bad musicians better. Time is money for studios, so they don't want to waste it on multiple retakes when someone can be close enough to make small fixes with melodyne. For session work, market effects still pressure people to, well, not make mistakes like that. A great singer is still going to be in higher demand than a decent one, because then the studios don't have to spend much time at all fixing their vocals.

Also, -noticeable- autotune can be desired. It's a musical choice. In that sense it's no different than using a vocoder, etc. I personally do not like it but that's the beauty of music; there's something for everyone.

Ever since then, it's not bothered me nearly so much when the vocals are tuned. The track hits harder. Yes: it's true the voice loses some of it's natural beauty, but in turn, you get music and voice that follow perfectly.

Now, I really hate hearing it in kids' songs. Sung by kids, for kids, and sounding so flat and blah. Much like laments against modern "beauty" productions, I think excessive autotune presents kids with an unrealistic expectation for their own voices.

But then the whole production sees similar things all over the place and it gets cleaned right up technically. Time, levels, the works right?

And the energy is diminished, could be lost.

Like fashion, this will all cycle in and out. Young people hear the humanity in music made prior to these and other tools and it appeals.

Little things, like a change in tempo, small vocal errors, inconsistency, all add up in a track.

I bet some time from now, could be as little as a decade, maybe two, we will look back at all this and chuckle.

Like you say, there is nothing technically wrong with any of this tech. And it could all be used very differently from how it is today too.

Recently, I have been going back through great live shows. Fantastic! And I still get that tingle from the realization someone delivered it live, to a crowd. And yeah, not so perfect, but oh so very human too.

Good application of it is not, no. When we hear obvious autotune vocals, it's a deliberate aesthetic choice.

I believe what you're talking about is how modern production is about producing "perfect" song recordings, and mapping everything to a click track/beat grid. Now that is totally noticeable compared to music made a few decades ago. I do agree that it makes music sound sterile. This is separate to autotune/melodyne being used.

"I bet some time from now, could be as little as a decade, maybe two, we will look back at all this and chuckle."

Maybe the main industry studios will, but music in general isn't determined by what those folks are doing. There are more indie publishers than ever, and so on.

And yes! The indies are all over the place. Love it.