Audio recording quality

This might be a dumb question, but what exactly determines the quality of a recording? Is it more about a specific thing like the mic or sound card or is it the entire setup?
Answer #1
In recording audio, the equipment you use is important, and the acoustics, the placement of the vocals and instruments. Then there’s the mixing, which all depends on how good the ear is of the person who’s doing the mixing. Then there’s the mastering of the recording itself for distributoin, eg. pressing it on CDs or converting it to audio used for digital distribution on the internet and various devices. If that gets ~ censored ~ up, no matter how good it was recorded, it’ll sound degraded. As to the recording itself, the best quality to convert the original to is using a lossless codec. Say you rip a CD and convert it to digital. The best quality you’ll get is if you use FLAC, APE, or WAV codecs (though WAV is not practical, the size is too big). Using FLAC or Ape, it’s compressed to a smaller size (though not as small as MP3 or AAC) but you will lose no quality, it will sound exactly the same as the CD. If you convert to lossy codecs like MP3 or AAC, you’re going to lose some quality, It won’t be the same as the original CD. However, if you have a cheap sound card or cheap speakers, it will sound like shit no matter if you use lossles or lossy.
Answer #2
I confirm what said.
It’s not any ONE thing that makes for top quality, it’s all the things together.
BUT any ONE thing of low quality can make the whole output low quality.
Every stage of the process need to be as good as you can make it and afford it.
And it’s not worth spending $$$ on any one section of the process if another is a cheaply done section.