Can a great system make a mediocre recording sound good?

@heretobuy 

very good choise playing some young Ry Cooder. Not bad, not mediocre, just very fine recordings and music. Classics.

@clearthinker

Therefore a system could be designed that would process poor recordings to sound like good ones. But the changes made would render the performance different from the original recording.

Isn’t this also what modern TVs do?

Re-interpretate and reimagine the signal being fed into them?

When you look at some of the new OLED screens, they are indeed impressive, but you would have call them realistic.

Hyper-realistic, maybe.

@sns

Poor recordings remain poor, no help can be found for these.

Agreed.

Perhaps the best thing to do with those is ( the vast majority) is to downscale the playback equipment to something with reduced bandwidth, scale and resolution, a bit like using soft focus photography, where they may appear benign and acceptable.

Aren’t these low bandwidth, low resolution recordings always likely to sound better on equipment such as boomboxes, car stereos, jukeboxes and smartphones rather than high resolution, high bandwidth equipment that they were never designed for?

In fact, just how many producers (Joe Meeek, Jerry Wexler, Phil Spector, George Martin, Brian Wilson, Mickie Most, Brian Eno, Quincy Jones, Rick Rubin etc) even considered audiophiles in mind when they were recording?

I’d argue that when it comes to audio resolution is clearly a two edged sword, and that is precisely why some of us attach far more importance to the faithful reproduction of timbre.

All recordings benefit from this but not all systems can deliver.

The trouble with this "it's not the system it's the room" argument is that the good recordings and the mediocre recordings are both being played in the same room. Moreover, it is the same room as my upgraded-from system. I fail to see what difference the room would make in comparing one recording to another in the same room. Judging from what some people spend on gear I'm sure some of them could afford different rooms to listen to different records, but that is not a lead I am in. A better system makes all recordings sound better than they were, but they all finish in the same order as before in terms of recording quality.

The Ry Cooder record is indeed a good choice, but I made it back in the 1970s when I bought it. Speaking of good choices, one thing I learned now that I have heard just about all of the original versions of the songs he covered, that whatever you think of him as a musician, he sure knew how to pick them. Something very interesting could be written about folk singers as music critics, based on their choice of material. 

The ultimate example of the difference digital mastering can make is a comparison of the first, second and third generations of the Complete Robert Johnson, the last of which is an absolute revelation. I think they might have had the original metal parts for that one. The ultimate test would be if someone had a pristine set of original 78s to compare it with, possibly to be found next to the Arc of the Covenant in that big warehouse at the end of the Indiana Jones movie.

I'm perfectly willing to turn the volume down if it'll make the music I want to hear more listenable.  By the same token, if I don't particularly care for the music but I'm compelled to listen because it's been recorded so insanely well, I'll turn it up and pretend I just don't hear my wife's "Turn that down!" shrieks.

@larsman - im not sure that I fully understand your question, but let me give it a shot - what I mean is that it is very easy to determine what a good recording is, because it will sound good, even on lesser sound/room systems. On the other hand, it is very difficult to determine if a recording is actually poor, because every level up the chain of resolving sound/room systems will bring ever smaller changes that will reveal ever more information regarding the subtle acoustics of the recording venue, ie, making the particular track sound more realistic, in bringing you to the place where the recording happened. For many of us, ‘good’ resides purely in the accuracy of instrument or voice reproduction as timbre and tone, timing, and what we like to refer to as the lowest amount of signal distortion. I have found that a better way of putting it has to include ‘….the accuracy of instrument and voice reproduction in the specific venue of the actual recording’ for the simple fact that almost every recording venue subtly (or unsubtly) changes the sound signatures of voice and instrumentation. A good example of unsubtle change can be found in Yukie Nagai’s last movement of Beethoven’s moonlight sonata, where better systems are able to parse the echo of the recording venue in transforming the somewhat ‘clouded’ sound that masks the venue on poor sound/room systems. A considerably more difficult recording to translate is Delia Fischer’s ‘choro de pai’, a small ensemble track that had the recording equipment placed such that the depth of field and separation of the instruments can only be heard on very very well power supplied and resolving sound/room systems. I am of the belief that the only truly bad recordings are the ones that have undergone so much post-production sound engineering so as to present parodies of the instruments, and of voices. A good example of this can be found in billy joel’s ‘New York state of mind’, but even so, it is still listenable with a better system. However, I have found that the bulk of what many refer to as ‘poor’ recordings are actually those among the likes of the Nagai and Fischer examples I gave - the Fischer example, especially, is one track I do not believe I have heard in all its nuance of recorded acoustic accuracy of venue, because of the greater depth of field, air, and separation I hear in it, with every greater sound/room system I have been lucky to hear it played back on.

My list of ‘poor’ recordings became eroded so much over time, I began to realise that in the world of unoverly sound engineered albums, there are actually very few recordings I should dismiss as bad, for the reason my sound/room system may not (yet) be good enough to playback the subtlest cues of reverberation, decay and atmospheric quality that we call realism. It is for this reason that I said a truly poor recording is very difficult to identify.

in friendship, kevin.