I think ideas like "sound quality" are highly subjective. I've been in the digital domain, making home productions, since 1993, using the same mic for most of that time. There's no reason to say the sound is more indistinct on the records you mention. What you might be picking up is deliberate stylistic devices: a cluttered cloud of microsound filaments designed by John Talaga, and a fondness I developed for running the whole track, sometimes, through SoundEdit16 tempo tools which create amazing, extreme stereo phasing effects. I did that (on songs like Lady Fancy Knickers and Klaxon) to perk things up, but it could be interpreted as extreme lo-fi, I guess, if you're a certain kind of audiophile. As for Joemus, I think those electronic sounds really shoot out of the speakers; cheap sound is very brightly coloured, and when it blips and bubbles away (as it does in Joe's productions) it creates a sort of high contrast blur more like a kaleidoscope than "mud".