A question to the Sound Engineers out there

I think the studio in the Bricasti video above is probably not like most studios. having said that there are some record labels that go to extremes.

Tacet - a label that goes to extremes when actually recording their live recordings do not have elaborate studios with big monitor style speakers either.

I do have some recordings from Norway that are amazing sound quality - so are their studios it seems - just a tad more extravagant.
norway recording studio images - Google Search

I guess these small speakers we see in the images are actually very good quality and you can't see if theay are coupled with sub's, so the "impression" is, their sound is rather limited. But I have to believe this is not the case

Tannoy seems to have gone to 6" drivers on their Recording & Broadcast speakers, so I guess the industry in general as moved in that direction and probably use sub's to augment the low frequencies.
Tannoy | Catalog | Product Applications

But I'm still confused as to how the sound guys create these cavernous images in such a restricted environment.

Regards - Steve

I must admit that I have found a lot of current music is mixed quite well, with excellent imaging and separation of performers - so they seem to be doing something right regardless of their studio environment.

I guess what prompted my OP is - I had just made some upgrades to cables that improved the sound of my system dramatically, but the level of venue acoustics on a couple of tracks now seemed a little over the top, so it got me wondering what gear the sound engineers used. They were obviously overshooting the mark.

When I looked at studio images, the setup on a great deal of them seemed to lack the "precision" we audio hobbyists might go to with our own systems.

That made me wonder how could they possibly create great sounding studio tracks that make you think that are actually recorded in a hall of some sort, without having a great sounding system that is correctly setup?

I guess there are some sound engineers that do go the extra mile for those tracks that sound really amazing.

Regards - Steve

@8th-note - Many thanks for your post, that has cleared up a lot of the "unknowns" that had resulted in seeing the images of the recording studio.

The biggest of which was basically...

How could the sound engineers possibly know what the finished track would sound like on an exceptional system when they are basically in such a small listening environment with what appeared to be less that optimal speakers

Cheers - Steve