Has your system changed the music you listen to?

For background, my current system began taking shape ~3 years ago. It replaced a ten year old mid-range receiver system used to play mostly rock and jazz; in that order.

The rock albums seldom come out anymore, except on those occasional retro inspired moments. Contributing to this disinterest are the too predictable nature of many rock "stylings" and a noticeable lack of dynamic content. The latter is influenced by having a better sound system. Now it is easy, maybe too much so, to tell when a recording is highly compressed. Musically most rock reminds me of jello now vs. when I was a kid. It's still fun, it still wiggles, but it no longer provides the same satisfaction. Not all rock has this failing, but it does seem to be the earmark of the genre.

By far jazz gets the most play time in my house today. The recordings as a whole are more dynamic, better produced and more musically involving, especially the vocals. Having a system that can do them justice likely contributes to the attraction, but the swing probably comes more from the maturation of my tastes. Along with my age, of course.

Who knows, as time goes by maybe symphonies will start sounding more interesting...

So, most of ya folks "transformed" into jazz becase:

a)jazz recordings have a good quality and sound great;
b)classical large-orchestral music is too expencive to bring it to the level of pleasant reproduction or even i'd say nearly impossible;
c)rock recordings are recorded poor.

C'est La Vie!

I don't know if it has anything to do with my stereo, but I have been listening to more C&W ever since I moved to Nashville. :o)

From the above replies it seems that most people have answered yes to the original question. Is it possible that people are confusing the effects of their evolving systems with the fact that virtually everybody who loves music has different taste at age 40 then they did at 20? I would hope that a good music reproduction system would encourage people to explore and appreciate different types of music, but it should never limit the type of music you might want to experience.

That was kind of my take on it too, Onhwy61 - some combination of having a nice system, enough money to purchase a fair amount of music, and getting older and broadening my horizons a bit has led me to explore and appreciate a much wider variety of music. To the extent that a nice system makes music listening more enjoyable, I guess it has contributed to changing the music I listen to, but not in the spirit of the original question. -Kirk