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ELI5: Why do old jazz recordings sound better than other records that have been released later on?

It seems to me as if most jazz records of the 50's and 60's sound way better in recording quality than most of the other music at that time (e.g. blues, country, rock, etc.) or even later on. Why is that?
gpt
**Why do they sound better than most of the other music at that time?**  
Jazz music, including its crooner singers and big bands, was some of the most popular mainstream music at the time. As a result, they had more budget and resources for good recordings.

**Why do old jazz recordings still sound better than newer music?**

From a music perspective, many of the musicians who were playing on the jazz records of the 50s and 60s were seasoned live performers and session musicians. The way records were recorded back then involved the whole band to be in the same space performing the music.

As a result, a lot of these musicians had lots of experience and good chemistry with each other, which meant they could groove better and bounce off each other musically.

In later times, as studio technology evolved there was less of an emphasis of capturing the perfect recording of the performance in the room, as session musicians could be swapped in and out and record on completely different days, multiple performances could be cut together and edited to fix mistakes, etc.  
Some people would regard say that as a result, some of the soul and imperfection was removed in favour of higher fidelity and perfect performances.

Speaking of music technology, the actual equipment was very different in the 50s and 60s.  
Because they couldn't record lots of microphones at once, often bands would have to perform around one or two microphones and members would have to physically move back and forth in the room to adjust their volume. This made the sound of the room a very important basis of the sound.

Modern recording methods favour multiple microphones allowing for the complete isolation of each member of the band, meaning that only the pure instrument is captured, allowing for greater fidelity, but without the character of the shared sonic space being in the record.