Doncha get bummed?

We put a lot of time, effort, and money into getting really nice systems.

And then we have to deal with crummy recordings made by inept engineers.

Yes, many of the older recordings suffer from being from the early days of stereo, but I've gotten a couple of recent recordings that are really bad.  One even had miscellaneous noises (like scraping chairs and ruffling music pages) at the ends on numbers that weren't even edited out.  Poor mic placement resulting in bloated bass.  Bad microphone choice on the piano making it sound muffled.  These are all well-reviewed recordings, too.  Huh?

Piano in the middle with no width or depth.  Bass out of the right speaker, drums out of the left.  Ho hum.

And microphone choices for female vocals!  Terrible more often than excellent.  Veiled, compressed, metallic.  Blecch.  Sucks the testosterone right out of me.

I have one relatively recent recording where the drums are clipped in every track.  Clipped.  Awful-sounding.

If it weren't for Manfred Eicher at ECM I'd probably shoot myself.

Bums me out.  Maybe I'll go back to a Japanese transistor radio from the 60s.