Quality system, make poor recordings sound better?


I notice that as I move up the audio chain, poor CD recordings sound worse and the good ones sound superb, should this be the case? Also I on any given day my system sounds different even with the same CDs. Any thoughts on this as well?
phd
Montytx,
A recurring theme with this type of topic is the detrimental effects of dynamic compression. This is often genre dependent, with popular and rock music suffering this more frequently. Jazz and classical recordings seem for the most part to avoid/ minimize dynamic compression nonsense. Most of my jazz CDs have a dynamic range averaging 25-30 db and some are 35-40 db with individual selections. It seems many pop and rock recordings are limited to 10-12 db range which is regrettable. I suspect that the good classical CDs are wide dynamic range recordings similar to the jazz genre. So it appears the recording engineers target certain markets by assuming what playback equipment the listeners will use, ipods, boombox, car and portable radios etc.
Charles,
My experience mirrors OP, Almarg ... In a high resolution system, one can hear the flaws in poor recordings. For me, the most obvious is compression, brightness and thinness.

11-06-14: Maplegrovemusic
can someone who feels as the op provide us with a recording you think is poor . i would like to play it through my system
Most Bruce Springsteen, Heart (Heart, Bad Animals ...), Liz Phair, Garbage V2.0 ...
Knight- Dreamboat Annie on Mushroom records, which I think is a KenDun master is actually a great sounding record.
The Dreamboat Annie masters were excellent. Nautilus did what I think was the best pressing of that album. Still my go-to for demoing Rock bass resolution(the synth & drum/Fender bass doubling on Magic Man)
there's some very good and interesting responses here but it would be nice if there were a few paragraph breaks for some of the longer ones