"Bridge Over Trouble Water" sounds artificial

I don't yet have a copy of BOTW, so I'll cross that ridge when I come to it.

I agree with many of the comments above.  That is, S&G early recordings were poorly done and don't sound well at all on a quality, high resolution system.  Vinyl copies are somewhat better than CD, but either one is not great by any stretch of the imagination.

When Paul Simon made solo albums things got much better.  There Goes Rymin Simon is very good, but still not excellent.  For the very best recording of Paul Simon try Graceland.  And especially the 25th Anniversary Edition release, RTI pressing.  It is absolutely stunning and will highlight the very best capabilities of your new system.

This is the best, perhaps only reason to have more than one music system setup.  For example my old car cassette mix tapes sound pretty good in my workshop on Spectrum 208As and Minimus 7's through a 1971 vintage KA-4002 integrated.
The office room has a multibit to a Vali 2 for monitoring and a Nobsound 3116 powering Pioneer S-H453F-K's and a JBL car sub for rocking out. In that room the cheap Chinese amp sounds much better than the Dynaco stuff it replaced.
None of these sources sound "good" on the "A" system.

Furthermore much of the old stuff was recorded and mixed for AM radio and cheap stereos, which we all had then.
Still, a lot of it sounds pretty good on "Wow I Haven’t Heard This Song in Years"
which streams at 128 kbps.
Alas, some of the troglodytes around here will NEVER hear those songs again

Glad I'm not the only one who noticed that about Simon and Garfunkel recordings. And I agree with Glupson about AM radio and some of those songs, and classical for that matter. As much as I love high fidelity stereo there are times when simple mono with limited frequency response from a simple radio just creates the magic somehow. I think it lets my imagination take over more, romanticize more. It's like 24 frame per second film compared to 60 frame per second. Too much information destroys something fancy going on in my head. 

I’m on the side of the fence that says I enjoy hearing what old radio tunes really sound like on a good quality modern hifi rig.. It’s often nothing like what you remember....so many things happening that were obscured prior.

If it’s relative lo-fi like from a car radio 50 years ago one pines for, lots of inexpensive options still for that.