I’ be been puzzling over this for years. One thing to help is to remember everyone on the other side, engineers, mixers, etc have all the control over this ‘Art’ they create. However, they can compromise for their perceived audience. Like any Art, a movie may be perfect for the cinema, but viewed from home may lack engagement or miss subtleties. If you can build your system toward coherence, soundstaging and try to get the bass right, then most recordings sound great. Some reveal real surprises, much as the artists intended. If the system is too imbalanced it can misemphasizes all those subtleties as irritants which is indeed hard to listen to. Most of these are dimensional cues and reverberations of the instruments, most ‘good sounding’ recordings isolate everything to remove any unwanted reverberations then add it back artificially. Musicians in a real room and all those reverberations actually sound good, so almost all blues and jazz and classical sounds fine. Rock is the culprit. A car for example may be a good place to listen to that stuff because there’s so much competition you tend not to focus in those subtleties which make it more enjoyable.
