High Performance Audio - The End?

Then you're not doing it right. Don't blame the recordings. My system is so revealing no two recordings sound the same. The differences between them all is clear and easy to hear. They are all enjoyable.

Sure, lower your standards enough and everything sounds just peachy. 

there can be no denying that the vast quantity of popular music that we listen to is not particularly well recorded.

That’s been the case for as long as I’ve been alive. People who only listen to pop music mostly just listen for fun and don’t really care about sound quality that much, so the stuff is mixed to sound good on a Boombox, crappy earbuds, or stock car radio. That was as true in the 70s as it is today and so I fail to see the point. There will always be a population that cares about making and listening to good and well-recorded music, and thus there will always be equipment made to play it back as faithfully and/or artfully as possible. To think otherwise is to me just an exercise in rhetoric.

On the flip side, turntables are starting to become “cool” again, and bars where people can just sit and listen to well-recorded music on good systems were starting to catch on before the damn virus hit — the theory being that people are so inundated with being plugged in and always “on” that they’re starting to embrace ways to disconnect, slow down, and just be in their own heads for a moment. If that continues and more people get to experience what a decent system can actually do and for not all that much money, who knows? Maybe in a counterculture kinda way higher-end audio could experience a bit of a revival.

Listening further into bad recordings is not enjoyable IME — the warts just get easier to hear. Yes, there are some good pop recordings, but sadly not many. When I want to listen to poorly-recorded music I like, I just fire up my Bluetooth speaker or earbuds as I can more easily just enjoy it for what it’s worth without feeling like I’m chewing on tinfoil. Anyway, that’s how I deal with it.