Originally Posted by Freebase Dali

I think that would depend... unless a particular piece of gear has a very distinct and obvious characteristic, it'd be pretty hard to pull that off. On top of that, you'd probably have to be pretty familiar with the particular gear as well.
Personally, I use a ton of different compressor plugins for different things, and even the best of them don't really have a distinguishable characteristic in terms of native sound, not to mention being able to hear it in the mix. Compression techniques, on the other hand, are a different story. For instance, it's very easy to spot when an engineer side-chain compresses heavily, using a kick drum as a trigger. And that happens to be a very popular technique in Electronic music.

Some microphones have very distinct characteristics that people can recognize, but usually they're people who have extensive experience with those mics. I guess the same could be true about preamps and such, but I doubt your average listener is going to have any luck pinpointing which they are.



Again, I think you'll have better luck spotting production techniques across genres than spotting equipment used, but I'm sure you can find resources around the web and track down gear-specific stuff. One way might be to find out who produces an artist's albums, who mixes them, masters them, etc... and see if you can find who they work for and maybe check out their website and see the gear yourself. Just an idea.