rich-
Rubber Soul and Revolver were recorded and mixed through a tube console, so the quality of the recorded tracks is indeed "thick" compared to an eagles record, but the instrumentation is about as minimal as you are ever gonna get. I wasnt suggesting that the vocals are particularly loud in level, just that there is not a great quantity of recorded tracks above which they need to rise. As such, you get to hear more of the air around the mic which would get lost if there are a bunch of other tracks forming a bed under the vocal. Take taxman for instance, you've got the entire band on a reduction in the left channel through the entire first verse with a nice clean vocal sitting in the middle and nothing competing with it in the right channel. It isnt until the seocnd verse that youve got a tambourine there. When the guitar comes in, the vocal goes away... Try to make a record like this. People talk about the genius of george martin as an arranger and a producer but fail, IMO, to really get into what made that man a god among the living. If they had double the rhythm guitar in the right channel for the entire song, the vocal would have a *completely* different feel which is why the "mr wilson" answers have the impact that they do, coming in where the guitar drops out. You can almost see the thought process behind splitting out the double vocals in dr robert based on whats happening with where the band is panned in the mix.
Anyway, they had few tracks to mix from and a small console to mix on so you know there wasnt any parallel bussing going on, etc. As such, the vocals have a space to breathe as they arent competing with a bunch of other ****, so you get to hear how really incredible the track sounds. Many other records have equally great vocal tracks, its just harder to hear as the arrangements for the songs feature much more stuff.
If you follow my logic, if you have a halfway decent mic and superstar talent singing into it, depeding on how sparse you can control yourself to be, you can make a record that sounds like this. On the other hand, you can have the best gear on earth and record 24 or more tracks and get less than impressive results. Reference everything that happened once 24 track became standard for examples of that.
dave