My first listen to a Ry Cooder album was Bop Til You Drop back around the early 1980s. Later on, I heard some negativity towards the album for being 'badly recorded' (probably knowing that it was a very early digital recording and knocking it for just that reason). In fact, I find Bop to be an outstanding album for both performance and recording and it's clear that the engineer kept the levels safely below digital clipping as all you need to do is turn the level up by +4dB or so.