Should a good system sound bad with bad recording?

if your speaking of the legal so-called bootleg, commercially released, live pearl jam recordings, the answer is THE BETTER THE SYSTEM, THE BETTER THEY SOUND. they were intentionally left ruff around the edges, but were indeed made for quality hi fi playback. aside from female voclas and small chamber recordings, most hi end systems are put through a reality check with large orchestra, and live rock and roll. most fail........are they audiophile quality...of course not....but are they worth owning and playing...you betcha

beheme-it isn't a so called 'audiophile recording'. like most modern recordings, it is however meant to be enjoyed on a quality playback system. the 'notion' that 'the better a system is-the worse most cd's and lp's sound' is about all any consumer has left to hang their hat on, when they find themselves with tens of thousands of dollars in equipment that they can't enjoy anything on. accurately reproducing the recording and enjoying the music are not different goals. no recording engineer sets out to make peoples ears bleed. unfortunately most high end speaker designs are not made to be listened to for hours on end. they are built specifically to impress a potential buyer using an audiophile quality recording. one that does not really 'test' the speakers at all. loudspeakers that do not favor one frequency over another, and maintain that balance with any ss or tube amp make just about any commercial recording listenable. ar, allison,hales,avalon,ohm,gradient,shahinian,castle,harmonic precision,harbeth,snell(the originals)chapman,enigma,totem,duntech,etc. are just a sample of speakers that are well engineered at all pricepoints. if you can't enjoy the history of recorded music from the dawn of high fidelity until today, you've got a problem that no amount of tweeking and component changing(other than speakers) can solve. those pearl jam recordings are not only historically significent-they rock. giving up the history of rock music alone based on a demo with a patricia barber or jennifer warnes cd(which don't sound bad even on a boombox)is nothing short of a bad purchase.

if you buy junk out of the bargain bin thinking it is real music, you are apt to buy awful speakers thinking they are well engineered.

sorry....one more thing, the origin of prat is from a marketing dept. you can't argue with an intangible_marketing 101

perfectionist is right. your stereo should accurately capture the performance and the recording itself. most recordings are meant to sound 'like recordings'. does anyone really think bernstein or the beatles and thousands of relavent recording artists were/are even concerned about 'air' and 'warmth' and all the other bs terms that equipment mongers use. a good stereo system makes you want to own the world's largest music collection. if you spend all your time worrying about each recording being a sonic wonder, you need a doctor, not an upgrade. to paraphrase woody guthie...'some men rob you with a gun, others with interconnects'.......for the most part neither man winds up being a scientist,an engineer, or even a music lover.

'prat' is like an audio 'farfegnugen'. it is a marketing idea that is beyond debate. its a clever way of expressing a 'faith-based' feeling. mac has always used "pride of ownnership"......its pretty hard to quantify or argue. your mindset determines prat. it also determines what is 'cool'. a case in point is an LS3/5a of any origin. even though this design is legendary from any brand , the rogers version is 'beyond' legendary.

i thought we were talking about the version on a commercially available cd, not the internet download.

does a kid hear prat from his favorite boombox? does a drunken dancer here it from a 'way-loud' pa in a disco? do i hear it in my favorite recordings? are there good eric clapton records with no prat? are there bad ones with it? is it put into the recording by the musicians or the engineers? prat is not created by a playback device. its an emotional reaction 'you feel' when you are enjoying music with your-own-bad-self. 'crossroads' by cream on any playback device has prat if your enjoying it.

according to a new stereophile poll, most audiophiles spend less on prerecorded music than a kid earns on a paper route. this speaks volumes about how twisted our collective goals are when we are spending far more on cables and equipment.