On a different note, share the artists you own that DON'T sound good

Dan Fogelberg. Love his way with words and his music, but most of his recordings are quite bad.  He played multiple instruments in many of his recordings and used multiple tracks to make one final mix.  He was a great musician, but sadly many recordings fall short of what they could have been. 

Many of my bootlegs of various artists.  Jeff Beck, the Grateful Dead, the Who and Little Feat to name a few.  Most are audience recordings made in the 70s.  I attended most of the shows so the nostalgia is great but the sound is usually poor.  Especially on my best system,

Yeah tune head....Yoko....I don't call that music ,at all.I tried over 50 years ago and said ...NOPE.

The "popier" you get the more over compressed it is likely to be.  It has little to do with the recording equipment, since many of the best sounding recordings are all-tube efforts from the fifties and sixties, especially classical and jazz.  The same kind of care was lost on the rock efforts, but that got better with time, and then digital hit and the "engineers" went crazy.  Somewhere in there the audio obsessed kids from the early eras grew up and got better home equipment.  They became audiophiles.  So did some of the engineers, and they had a market, a new one, to satisfy.  The ones producing teeny junk kept doing that but even they had to start making allowances for mid-fi equipment that was now getting much better.  I see somewhere in there someone said Charley Patton was poorly recorded!  All of this is relative.  Most of us are listening for two things:  the performance, and the sonics.  God bless Thomas Edison, I say, who was nearly deaf.  

@howardlee "Most of us are listening for two things: the performance, and the sonics".

Well said!

Couldn't have said it better myself.