Why Do Some Recordings Sound Great and Others Dead?

With my current setup I don’t have any tone controls.  The NODE has some when using the internal DAC.  I’m bypassing that into the SMSL DAC, which has no tone controls.  I don’t have a preamp, and my speakers are powered.  I’d have to put something into the system like a Lokius, minidsp or minidsp ddrc24.  There are some crossover frequency and q controls on my subs.

Some recordings sound great and others dead because of differences in recording, mixing and mastering.

I hear five different classes of sound quality in my collection of albums, even ranking each album D, C, B, A, A+ based on sound quality only.

This has nothing at all to do with the "music quality" of the material or the artists.

That's a great idea tom. I've got alot of used classical records from my father and an estate sale.  Ranking them sounds like a wise idea!

How do you rank them? Do you use post it notes or some other method?

:unsure:

@jjbeason14 Thank you.

I maintain SQ lists in the notes app on my phone.