Lo-fi high fidelity; it sounds like a contradiction, doesn’t it? Lots of guitar pedals, software effects, and hardware units offer to “lo-fi” your sound for you, and yet manufacturers always promise higher and higher fidelity when recording. Why do you need an expensive audiophile-quality microphone, preamp, processor, or converter if you’re only going to make your tracks sound trashy later on?
The answer is that there is a significant difference between recording something well and then using processors to add noise or reduce the bit depth, and recording something poorly and doing the same. If you’re relying on “lo-fi-ing” your tracks after the fact, in many cases, the higher the fidelity you’re able to capture from the source, the more your sound will be able to handle “lo-fi” processing and still hold together later. If your source material is poorly recorded, it may become unusable as soon as you start to lo-fi it up.
So even if you’re planning to mix your recordings to sound lo-fi, it’s generally worth your while to start with the very best recordings you can, so you have a solid base to build your lo-fi masterpiece upon.
* Note that we’re not talking about “lo-fi” tracks that result from recording less-than-stellar instruments or other sources that are “lo-fi” by nature. We’re talking about processing already recorded tracks to make them lo-fi.