Speakers that reveal bad recordings? Not for me.

jaybo,

"its been my experience that the most neutral loudspeakers i've heard throughout the bandwidth are also the most enjoyable with all recordings. its no coincidence that many of the ones with dynamic drivers are also acoustic suspension"

Me too.

I'm sure most of us have at one time or another heard examples of very expensive loudspeakers which may have been good in one facet or another, but unfortunately strayed unacceptably far from neutral at one frequency or another. 

Sometimes the result would be a thin sound in the mids, at others a little too muddy. The real train crash tended to happen when the recording also suffered in a similar way to the speakers.

For example the U2 albums The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree and Acting Baby! could all give certain loudspeakers real issues as also could the Pogues third album If I Should Fall From the Grace of God. 

All 3 were very system dependent. Of course those 3 examples are just the tip of a Titanic sinking iceberg.

In my experience the attempt to fix things via cables or amps hardly ever succeeded for long term satisfaction. 

On the other hand well recorded tracks such as Joan Baez's Diamonds and Rust, simply defy any system at any price to make them sound bad. 

So what speakers make poor recordings sound good?Bose 901s perhaps but they use an equaliser.

I love hearing well-recorded music on my fairly neutral and revealing
system.  The complete suspension of disbelief and the unclouded “they are here” or “I am there” experience is one of the pure joys in my life, and there are tons of very good recordings out there that keep me more than happy — especially now with streaming through Qobuz.  Squashing or limiting that for the sake of benefiting poor recordings seems sacrilegious to me, and if I want to listen to crap or lesser recordings I listen to them on a cheap mini system or Alexa where they’re more at home anyway.  But that’s me. 

audiophiles don’t listen to music with their equipment, they listen to their equipment with music. The more obsessed I became with gear and sound quality the less, I found, I was enjoying the music. I love the stones and the beatles but most of their music has no "sound quality" at all. I listen to a lot of good songs streaming youtube music videos but the mp3 s.q. is the worst. I just got maggie LRS speakers and they do make sh!tty recordings almost unlistenable. But I still have my wooden box speakers (ELAC debut B6)for when I want to rock out. And bad recordings do sound more listenable on them. My second wife was hotter looking than my first but sex wasn’t as good. Not sure what this has to do with anything but it seems somehow related.

This hobby is a lot more boring when everything sounds the same. The variety of recordings out there to experience makes it a lot more interesting and surprising at least for me.

The fact is all recordings are done differently and any attempt to ignore that will probably lead to less than desirable results long term.