Should a good system sound bad with bad recording?

Slappy, my friend is actually a Chef in a respected restaurant in Montreal so I will pass your comment to him, I am sure this will wipe the residual smile he may have thinking my system is mediocre!!!

Jaybo: interesting point. Is the issue of resolution one that we should care about then? if the complete concert is about 200MB (thus about 120MB per 1 hour CD), how can this be an "audiophile" recording? I think I am missing sthg here. I like your perspective though as it goes against the "grain"!

I agree with most of you guys even if you are saying opposite things! I for one do not give much about PRAT and other marketing buzz words and I want my system to show what's in the recording yet still make it enjoyable - overall.

HOWEVER, the Pearl jam bootleg recording I was exposed to last week was really inaudible, or should I say, very hard to appreciate as it did not sound like live recording to me, totally muffled and cacophonous. Without knowing about its resolution or else at the time, I immediately thought this was a case of highly compressed files. Jaybo: how could a decent system make these files "good" if they are, by definition, of lesser quality than the average definition that our systems were designed for? think of it like cars and roads. The average car is designed for average road qualities. If you take that car and take it in serious off-roads condition, it ain't good at all. It does not mean the car is poorly designed, it is simply out of the range of application it was designed for.

Is it possible there is a compression range that manufacturers use when designing audio gear? Is it possible that those bootleg recordings sit outside that range?

"I checked the site he downloaded from"...

I was talking download.