What is a bad recording?

To me, many of the recordings of the late 70's and 80's that used too much compression and too many over dubs.  Listen to Muddy Waters "Folk Singer" recorded in the 50's on a good system sounds like you are in the room with him and total range of lows/highs.  Then listen to ELP Brain Salad Surgery, yikes a compressed glary mess 

Funny someone brings up Brain Salad Surgery, no doubt that is a mess! First ELP album pretty nice, how did they go so wrong. Sound quality on Asia's recordings same compressed glare crap.

@sns

This is one of my "go to" cuts for resolution:

https://youtu.be/fDBjQ3r3cAM

Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of progressive rock was recorded this way.  Yes is similar.

Now this cut separates what can sound like pure noise on the wrong system, or many streaming platforms I’ve heard, but on a good system, the imaging of the clavinets is amazing.

https://youtu.be/9c9KvU6cE6E

To me, a bad recording is one where the highs and lows were rolled off. One can try to compensate, but if the frequency was never there, it’s very hard to make it sound like it’s there. 

There is more bad rooms than bad recordings if we listen to classical music ...

In jazz there is at least as much bad recordings as there is bad rooms ...

For more commercial music the room matter often not or way less  because so much recordings are often bad or offensive...

The system/room acoustically translate the recording... A bad translation will spoil the original text so well written it could be... But for a bad text a good translator can improve in decreasing the pain ...