Does Heavy Metal music benefit from a high end audio system?

First, I don't equate "high resolution" with price. The recording engineers certainly don't record on $100K speakers. Or even $10K speakers (although Genelecs come close).

Secondly, Led Zeppelin is not heavy metal. Black Sabbath is recognized as the start of metal (although a few would claim it's Blue Cheer). Thirdly, "heavy" metal is now a genre of "metal". "Metal" is the umbrella term.

Moving on. As someone who listens to metal 90% of the time, the answer is "Yes". If the sound is recorded it's obviously better to be able to hear it as recorded. Take Metallica's Sad But True as an example. Bob Rock put plywood on the walls to get a bigger drum sound. In my car I can't really tell. But I can on my system.

Rock, hip-hop and metal recording has been plagued by the Loudness War, which squashes the dynamic range. So there are only a few songs I'd use in a demo. Where I find some speakers fall apart with metal is on congested extreme (technical death) metal. There's just so much sound all at the same time the speaker puts out mush. One such song would be Hideous Divinty's The Servant's Speech (warning: this is not for the uninitiated).

Some other songs to hear what a good system can do on metal:

Exodus - Deathamphetamine (good drums)
Oceans of Slumber - The Banished Heart (superb female vocals)
Andromeda - The Words Unspoken (interesting guitar/synth coordination; precise lead guitar tone)
Metal Church - Metal Church (drums)
Deviant Process - Unconscious (well-defined bass)
Distant Dream - Sleeping Waves (reverb; imaging; guitar dynamics)
Sylosis - The Blackest Skyline (well-defined forward rhythm guitar)
Xanthochroid - In Deep and Wooded Forests of My Youth (a non-metal well-recorded song from a metal band, with superb vocals, flute, acoustic guitar and accordion)

@cd318

 Hmm... maybe someone should start a thread on well recorded Heavy Rock and Metal albums available in the digital format?

As far as dynamic range, that's already been done.

https://dr.loudness-war.info/

@limomangus@arcticdeth

I grew up at the perfect age, of the beginning of the NWOBHM music

My first album was Black Sabbath’s Paranoid ... WHEN IT WAS A NEW RELEASE (facepalm/smh). Talk about feeling old. But as fits my personality type, I never got stuck on the music of my late teens like most people. I kept progressing up until today while retaining my enjoyment of some of the older stuff.

Through the late 70’s we only considered two bands "heavy metal." Black Sabbath and Judas Priest (post-Rocka Rolla). I thought the 1970 song Jury by Trapeze came close. I played the heck out of that album (Medusa) in 1973-4.

There was nothing I considered metal again until ’81 with Iron Maiden’s Killers, which I didn’t like. I thought it was too fast. My how times have changed. Some might include Anvil in ’81. The real start of the proliferation of metal began in ’82 when I heard Witchfinder General and Angel Witch. ’83 kicked it off with a vengeance with Slayer, Metallica and Mercyful Fate. And ’84 was amazing. The period between ’84-88 was loaded with phenomenal metal. There were still good releases from ’88-92, but you could feel that something had changed. There was a short period where groove metal appeared. Then we had a dry spell from ’92-04. Thrash bands went Nu-metal, and after death metal band Entombed woke everyone up in ’90, with a few exceptions death metal hadn’t quite found its form yet, and after the brilliant ’87 release of Candlemass’ Nightfall, doom metal fizzled. In 2004, my interest peaked again when some of the death metal and metal-core bands started to release some decent music, like Killswitch Engage’s The End of Heartache, Cataract’s With Triumph Comes Loss, Full Blown Chaos’ Wake The Demons and Kataklysm’s Serenity In Fire.

Metal is now this humungous category with a huge number of genres that are indecipherable except to hardcore metal-heads. Progressive metal and technical death metal seems to draw some of the best musicians in the world, mainly because they’re the only ones who are capable of playing some of that stuff (for example Dream Theater). There are thousands of releases every year, most of them pure crap, but a few gems seem to pop up every year. And some genres go downhill while others suddenly become relevant again. For example, around 2013 death metal started to go dissonant, while doom metal made a resurgence with quality releases. A couple, Trees of Eternity’s Hour of the Nightingale and Draconian’s Sovran are stunningly brilliant.

BTW articdeth, I don’t think metalarchives.com includes all metal. For some reason they refuse to recognize hardcore as metal. I can see if the band sounds derived from The Ramones, Bad Religion or Sex Pistols, but I think any metal-head who doesn’t listen to Nail’s Suum Cuique or Wide Open Wound because they don’t come across Nail in metalarchives has possibly missed out on two of the heaviest metal riffs of all time. Born From Pain’s brutally heavy Sands of Time is also missing. And they regularly mislabel the genres, such as listing The Destro as "Death/Groove" when they are really "Groove/Hardcore" with nary a blast beat, growl or tremolo picking to be found. Great band BTW.

@pwdmark
I think it takes a certain personality trait to prefer metal (same as with any genre), but I think Tool is one of those transition bands that people can dip their toes in to find out. They live on the border of hard rock and metal, their albums have some of the best sound quality of any hard rock/metal (but are sometimes a little "weird") and they are not overwhelming (too fast).

I'm not a huge "alternative" fan, but I like Erra. They immediately reminded me of two albums in my library, although these albums lean more toward heavy than as alternative as Erra. They are Divinity - The Singularity (try song, Lay In The Bed You Made for that alternative flavor)  and Beyond The Fall - Antibody (mostly because of the similar vocals).

Like you, I wanted more complexity, but my "power inclination" always drives me to crave simple chugging. So I usually wind up liking a combination of the two. Especially complex songs with a brutally heavy breakdown. I play guitar (and some bass), so I understand how to rate the difficulty. I know a lot of people think metal is a lot of noise and screaming, but they are monumentally mistaken. I can play a lot of Van Halen, but I can't come anywhere close to the rhythm speed and tightness of Warfect's Fredrik Wester on the songs Drone Wars or Inflammatory, which BTW is on what I consider the best thrash album since the late 80's, Exoneration Denied.