better gear, worse recordings

Excellent point Samg. The goal is a music system, not a sound system.

Interesting thread,I guess I'm with Kirk on his standpoint.
Although others make interesting points CFB,Finberg and Bomarc amongst them.
Being new to the audio game (maybe 5 years)but a big music fan for 21 years-I often find myself a bit baffled by the continious talk of bad recordings,I simply don't hear that many.
Of course I'm not suggesting there aren't bad recordings-either older ones or the odd new one that does sound overcompressed (U2's last springs to mind)but I guess I simply don't buy that much music that is prone to that type of production.
There is of course others that simply have a terrible production imho (The Strokes debut for example).
However to refocus totally on the original posting I have to say on my last upgrade-a new DAC, that so far I've yet to hear a single recording(CD's) from my collection that sounds worse however the presentation is different but it is in a positive way-I maybe not as discerning a listener as others and I guess at approx $7k my system isn't exactly at the top end.
Of course having a reasonable system does for example make Led Zeppelin 3 sound different than it did on my old mono record player in 1977 but I've never heard it sound better and if it does highlight flaws in the recording then somewhere in my brain is totally cancelled out by my love of the actual music.
I'm not sure if Peleon was at the wind up but you know he might actually have a point.
I find that when I listen to inferior systems to my own I'm nearly always surprised how much better it sounds than I expect but maybe that's because I'm not over analytical about how it sounds but rather what it's playing...

From my perspective, I cannot do anything about the quality of the CDs I love (except perhaps re-buying them over and over again, if possible, as they iterate up the higher-bit-mastering chain - which is kind of annoying and expensive - or waiting for broadband to deliver MP3-SACD++ on demand).

Therefore, I feel that the challenge is to construct (with a little help from friends... and you all here at Audiogon, AA, etc.) a system that reproduces real music at as high a resolution as possible, regardless of the quality of the input.

The resurgence of tubed equipment is in direct response to this problem (as mentioned above).

High-end CD players (Linn CD12 was the first, IMHO) are also finally being designed with the goal of playing non-audiophile CDs on audiophile systems.

Forgiving (but still high-resolution) speakers are also helping (especially as they are now often asked to reproduce video sound (TV and DVD) which is often worse than early 80 CDs)...for example the Revel Salon is able to sound detailed but 'never' harsh in the difficult to endure THX treble ranges (though, I believe for other reasons, it is not the most musical of speakers).

All this is to say, with all this good equipment available, I believe it is the system which is at fault if music does not sound musical and is not entertaining for both the analytical and emotional aspects of the listener.

Of course, because I personally do not care if the piano is 12 feet wide (I just imagine I am sitting 1 foot in front of it), or if the other aspects of the reproduction are not true to life (I have hardly EVER heard unamplified music other than a symphony or a guitar/banjo), I am perhaps more forgiving of unnatural effects than others may be (and techno and electronica are by definition unnatural :-).

Great responses to an interesting observation. It's not been a problem for me. As my system and hearing abilities have evolved I'm better able to hear some of the recording techniques on records, but this doesn't detract from my enjoyment of the music. Good music easily transcends the quality of the recording and/or playback equipment. I'm a much happier audiophile since I realized this.

Nice posts, all.
Re People Time: I agree that this LIVE cd is a bit hot.
But that's the best they could do in Copenhagen in a loud club: stick a mike in Getz' horn. It SHOULD sound hot and nearly painful!
Re Piano width: When I play my B it easily fills the wisth of the room, so yes, it seems 14' wide. This is a bit more unnerving on a recoding back in the listening chair, but nothing like as bad as cymbals all over the place or od course the 10' wide violin. But big pianos DO have BIG soundboards!
I remember reading something a long time back about spectral tilt: something like---
Average folks prefer a 1-2 db/octave rolloff above 1k.
Musicians and engineers 0.5-1 db/octave, and of course, audiophiles ZERO rolloff!
So part of me wants to equate analytical processing and psychoacoustic effects with high frequency cues, and therefore it's no wonder that flatter, extended response gets us into trouble with most musical/acoustic flaws.
As no reproduced musical experience can be perfect at BOTH transducer ends, as well as intermediate processing, it's naturally harder to "find" musical happiness when the treble info quotient is high.
Environmental noise effectively masks treble info. (Thus Avalon sounds ok in a convertible at speed...and lots of 70s hits sound better on an old 5 tube radio with no response above 8k, and a single 5" stiff speaker. WONDERFULLY coherent and musical, actually. Like BUTTA!)
From another angle, my search of the past year or so for an acceptable digital front end perhaps taught me that extended
HF response via upsampling, etc., was not the holy grail.
ARCAMS, Meridian and Bel Canto went by the wayside.
Yet rolling off the top, whereas it usually restored musicality, took too much of a toll on the rest of a great system's strengths. Then I got a detailed and measurably-flat CDP that simply doesn't sound shrill. I frankly don't quite get it. Yes, crappy CDs still sound that way. But MANY CDs that were too shrill and edgy on other mid-level CDPs simply sound acceptable, WITHOUT turning down the treble. So something else is at work here, NOT just spectral tilt.... Nonetheless, I still believe that changing spectral tilt-optimization can ALMOST be the panacea that restores the musicality quotient minima that we require psychoacoustically. I hate to think we just used to call them tone controls...or lately interconnects. Ha!