Is Recording quality the real culprit?

When I was a young person over half a century ago I thought that a bad recording was doomed to provide an unsatisfying listening experience too.  Then I got a pair of Stax electrostatic headphones, SR-5s.  One night, after enjoying Workingman’s Dead in its glorious Wally Heider produced stereo sound, I put on a Chess reissue of Howling Wolf…More Real Folk Blues…and was flabbergasted that these crude, raunchy, monaural recordings, often displaying gross mic overload, sounded thrillingly alive and immediate.  I learned that a truly linear, cohesive, distortion free transducer, like electrostatic headphones, could let any recording shine.  This was before punk rock, of course!  Having speakers that do this trick is a more challenging task.

Excessive compression is easily number one culprit, luckily I don't listen to a lot of this overly produced drivel. Perhaps recording quality has helped subconsciously steer me towards less commercial artists. Still, I'd say unlistenable recordings few and far between, I can usually hear past the warts and get into the music.

I'd suggest the ability to listen to lesser recordings says as much about us as our systems. Quit the critical analysis of sound, accept it as presented, once you get past this you can enjoy the performance.

Before the age of streaming we were at the mercy of the recording quality. 

With streaming, and millions of recordings so easy to access we can populate our favourites folders  with music that is wonderful and well recorded as well.

For example, This week I wanted to listen to some Ella Fitzgerald. A tidal search offered up well over 200 albums, including the Clap Hands Here Comes Charlie! which Analog Productions released as a 2 LP set.

Now I have a bunch of Ella to listen to without having gambled on buying any albums that sound poor. Audiophiles and music lovers have never had it so good!

Considering some people believe a digital signal can sound better or worse depending on a cable or "connection" material, it wouldn't be surprising to find that some of them would believe their system could improve the sound of a poorly recorded song (but they'd be wrong about that too).

Album quality is of course hit or miss, depending on who the recording engineer was, the producer, the mixing and mastering engineer, and the label. Ironically most young artists don’t have a clue and go with the flow of whatever those with "supposedly" better technical knowledge tell them. [I still wonder why Adele’s "30" sounds so bad].

Steve Gutenberg recently mentioned that a 1959 live recording of Harry Belafonte sounds "audiophile" with a great soundstage and imaging, along with dynamics, while a 1970s recording of Al Kooper sounds compressed to hell, but both can be enjoyed.

I mean yeah you can eat a quality steak, but you can still enjoy hamburger. You just have to let go of the idea that everything is going to sound great.

Many popular albums for whatever reason, done in the 1970s are "thin" sounding. I can usually make these sound a bit fuller with a touch of EQ and I do. At least in the 1970s most of the albums weren’t compressed to hell as happened later on during the evil spawn from Hell, ’loudness wars’ done for freaking AM and FM radio.

Think of your audio system as a TV. Maybe 8K and maybe you have it tweaked to the best picture quality it is technically capable of, but then you watch something like The Blair Witch Project that was recorded on a VCR with 240 lines of resolution. LOL. No, you can’t polish a turd, and if you try, you most likely won’t like the result.