As system improves, do bad recordings sound worse?

bad recordings should sound better but the differences between all kinds of recordings should become more apparent. most recordings should be listenable unless the copy is defective.

Thanks for the responses so far.

Maybe the recordings actually were not 'bad'. Something in your previous system MADE them sound bad.

Elizabeth - There's some truth in this, I think. What was paradoxical, though, was that sometimes what made recordings sound worse was an ostensible IMPROVEMENT to the system.

In the OP of a recent thread, I suggested one possible theory for this, namely, that the combination of highly resolving downstream components (e.g., speakers) with less resolving upstream components (e.g., sources) tends to result in the magnification of the flaws of the upstream components. Therefore, when a downstream component is upgraded, without a comparable improvement to upstream components, flawed recordings might actually sound worse.

...as my system improved and the things that were right about the recordings were reproduced with greater realism, my attention would be drawn by that realism to what was right about the recordings, and not what was wrong.

Al - This captures my experiences during the second half (more or less) of my upgrade history, but not the first half.

Bad recordings should sound better but the differences between all kinds of recordings should become more apparent.

Mapman - I agree with this completely. I made a similar observation in another recent thread.

I believe as you improve your system, the ability to play back music with higher resolution improves, but a bad recording will still be a bad recording played back on a higher resolution system. There is no fixing a bad recording and using whatever mechanism to play it back will only highlight more of the problems of the bad recording but at a greater and higher resolution.
Ciao,
Audioquest4life

Audioquest4life says it best. You can't get something out of nothing. If the source is flawed, the rest of the chain cannot fix it. Perhaps a helpful tool in our hobby would be the Recording Engineer's name just below the song title, or at least next to the label.

I believe a bad recording is a bad recording, garbage in garbage out.
What recordings do you use when you are making changes (improvements) to your system? Do you use only the best recordings or do you use average recordings? The really exceptional recordings sound good on any system and when we compare the best recordings to average recordings it can be disappointing.
I believe everyone has experienced what you have mentioned here.
If we make an improvement and a group of recordings sound worse, did we really make an improvement?
I know a speaker manufacturer that would only use vinyl when designing his speakers. He said it was because vinyl sounded better. You can imagine how bad CDs sounded on those speakers. He finally realized he had to use both formats.
The same is true for evaluating our systems. We need to use a wide variety of recordings otherwise our music collection will shrink to a tiny handful of recordings.