Quality system, make poor recordings sound better?

I have found just the opposite . The more my system gets dialed in the better all recordings are . I listen strictly to digital . Right now 90% of songs sound fantastic . Last winter i would skip through my playlist looking for the best recordings , A slave to an improperly amplified set of speakers. Proper amps for my speakers and a few other changes made a night and day difference . Something in your system is not jiving , could be room , speaker placement , mismatch of components ,ect... It is not the recordings that are poor . Obviouosly some are better than others . But no recording done for a major record label should sound terrible ,regardless of format .

can someone who feels as the op provide us with a recording you think is poor . i would like to play it through my system . Thanks

All i know is last year the same recordings i attributed to poor now sound great . a lot of tweaks since then . Makes me think it is not the recordings. But the system i played them on . When over %50 of my catalog not sounding good last year to being able to listen to pretty much anything now . It is nice . opens up a much larger world of enjoyable listening .

the recordings must have sounded good to someones ears . more than one set of ears will hear a recording before it is pressed . how does a poor recording get let by ? cheap radio shack equipment in a major studio ?

bands can take years in the studio to make records. you think they are going to let crappy produced music out ? There has to be some kind of quality control. Some times it gets redone by a different producer if the record company or artist is not happy with the final product.

I could see live venue recordings having sound quality all across the board . Not controlled environments to mic up and room acoustics playing a big part . IE Classical and jazz recordings

good point mapman . noise and distortion is a sound quality killer on any system

Minorl ,so the equipment change made the difference . Albeit in a negative way . Do not equate spending more money on a new ar pre as being more truthful to sound quality . Your pre is adding it's own sound signature

Alot of studios use ATC scm50 monitors that cost over 20k . So all this talk about studios using inferior equipment is not true . The founder of Stereophile magazine stated the ATC were the closest thing to live sound he heard in his home.

http://www.positive-feedback.com/ambackissues/atc.htm

read this review and take note of the last paragraph about less than stellar recordings sounding great

Well put by atma and what i have experienced. The volume i can listen too if i
choose to is much louder than before . Must be the higher ordered harmonics
atma spoke of . I actually listen to the music at lower volumes than before
because the
bass seems to pressurize the room at lower volumes as the equipment and room
tweaking have improved.

I believe to me that is the holy grail . The high order harmonics he spoke of .
How does one go about eliminating the stress from those frequencies . For me it
was proper amps on my electrostatic speaker , along with using a passive pre . I
had thought it was the recordings i listened to that was the problem . Now all
seem to be in the same league with each other . Newer popular recordings sound
pretty darn good (compressed and all) just need to slightly turn the volume
down V.S. hifi recordings .

what makes a great recording ? To me as i am skipping around my digital library the songs that have pleasant frequencies are listened to most . Along with great separation of instruments in the soundstage . Maybe strong bass notes will get me listening to a particular track also.