Quality system, make poor recordings sound better?

I composed the following before seeing Minorl's post just above, with which I agree entirely:

Gentlemen, keep in mind that a key goal in the engineering of most recordings is presumably to make them sound as appealing as possible to as many potential purchasers as possible, when played on the equipment that is used by as many of those potential purchasers as possible. That can be expected to include people listening in cars, on radios, on portable equipment providing mp3 playback through cheap headphones, and on low fi home equipment.

Toward that end, recordings, especially those involving orchestras, are generally captured with an excessive number of microphones, and are then excessively processed in elaborate electronic consoles, the processing involving mixing, equalization, dynamic compression, dynamic range limiting, etc. With the people doing all of this often being possessed of musical sensitivity and basic competence that is questionable at best. A'gon member Learsfool, who is a professional classical musician and has had more direct exposure than most of us put together to the ins and outs of orchestral recording as it is commonly practiced, has attested to and justifiably ranted about all of this in a number of past threads here.

It's not about quality control. It's about intent, approach, philosophy, and in some cases competence.

Regards,
-- Al

Minorl ,so the equipment change made the difference . Albeit in a negative way . Do not equate spending more money on a new ar pre as being more truthful to sound quality . Your pre is adding it's own sound signature

This makes sense. The better resolution your system has the more detail you will hear - good or bad. If your system has certain character such as overall warmness it may help a marginal recording but there's only so much it can do. Garbage in, garbage out. This is why audio forum people are so sensitive to recording technique, mastering, pressings, etc.

There really is a choice to be made when assembling a system. It's an age old argument in audio. Do you want to see the tree or the details on the leaves? It's an individual choice.

If your goal is towards components that are accurate and precise then only high quality recordings will sound good and you will tend to only listen to 50 or so recording that sound good. Reason why, your system will tend to emphasize details revealing anomalies in poor recordings. Such systems will tell you more about the recording process than about musical intention.

If, on the other hand, your goal was toward a musical system then a wider variety of recordings will tend to sound good. Here the emphasis is not on detail and accuracy but on flow, coherence, liquidity and other musical traits. This doesn't mean that the system is not detailed or accurate it's just that these traits aren't being emphasized.

Both approaches tend towards extremes and ideally you may want to walk a fine line between the two.

This phenomena is something us old-timers have been discussing for decades. This suggests to me that the OP might be a relative newcomer to the hobby. IMO there's 2 schools of thought. The 1st being that a system can be so ruthlessly revealing that it reveals all the shortcomings inherent in the original recordings. The 2nd being that a system has a, for lack of a better word, 'euphonic' sound quality that helps the overall sound of any recording. These are 2 extremes with most systems falling somewhere 'in between'. The debate has raged about accuracy vs. musicality forever and will continue to do so but I think it all comes down to personal taste and the gear one buys based on those preferences. The thought just occurred to me that I learned so much about all this stuff from Harry Pearson during the 80's when I 1st got into this hobby. Thx HP, RIP!