So how can a great system solve less than great recordings

I agree with jbirdman333. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, even with very expensive equipment. Just this past Saturday, when I played a Rolling Stones compilation - hits from 1964 - 1970 - I thought "Sympathy For the Devil", one of my favorites, sounded awful. I could hardly hear Jagger's lyrics over the instruments. So I got a "remastered" CD of the single album, Beggars Banquet, overnight from Amazon. It sounded much better - I could hear Jagger's lyrics more clearly than on the compilation CD.  It just showed me that it basically boils down to the quality of the  recorded source material, no matter how good the equipment is downstream.  I have now ordered several other remastered Rolling Stones CD's to see (hear) whether the single albums outranked the same cuts on the poorly recorded compilation album.

One can only put so much lipstick on a pig.

If you've great equipment, it will only make an old recording....sound really bad really well. *L*

I can eq only so far, process to a certain degree, but....

In the end...what one starts with is what one gets to listen to. *sigh*
Beyond that, one is at the mercy of 'remastering', and all that.
"They" have the really nice toys to knock the dust off of what was once what we recall.....and we all should remember how fallible memory can be, and how it be disappointed so easily when one revisits the past. ;)

MHO....you're free to have your own. 

Forward....into the past, J

Sometimes it's that old 60's Dansette record player that gets the best out of a recording because it doesn't faithfully reproduce everything. Also if you are of a certain age, that's how you remember hearing it :^)

Why do you imagine a great system can make a poor recording better??

A great system reproduces accurately what is in the groove/pits, that's all.

If you want to go that way, get some new-fangled digital enhancer that makes the recording sound more like what you want to dial in.
And kills the soul of the music.

My goal for a system is accuracy.  If the original recording source was poor, I prefer the system that reveals that.
if I want a system that buries that under a pile of distortion and artifact, I would go back into vinyl