High Performance Audio - The End?

Frankly, if you're listening to today's pop music on anything more than a 40 year old Sansui receiver and Radio Shack Nova speakers, then you've wasted your money on a quality music system.

jnorris2005, perhaps you can temper your declarative attitude. Others prefer different genres of music; get used to it. The high end certainly doesn't revolve around your taste. 

Further, you seem to have profound ignorance of premium audio systems' performance. ALL genres of music sound superior on a superb system. As a reviewer I use many genres of music, some which I do not care to hear regularly. These are valuable to assess the outer limits of performance. Without fail, the better the audio system, the better all genres of music sound on it. 

The fact of the matter is that the bulk of audiophiles' systems are not that good. Contemporary music sounds bad on these systems because they simply cannot handle it, while superior systems can. It's foolish to blame the genre of music when the system is poor. If you're running a $5-10K rig, then do not expect such music to sound great. Conversely, anyone can delude themselves into thinking their system is all that when it sounds good playing simpler, less challenging music. The fact is that if the modern music sounds poor on your system, then it's not that great of a system, and/or you didn't set it up well. 

I listen to more “new” music than old/classic, despite having an enormous collection of the latter. EDM has been my thing since I was a kid, so I keep up with whatever’s new. The old curmudgeons on here who think all new music is poorly produced should be ignored because it’s just not true, they just don’t like the content. 

Steve's point, and it's one I've seen mentioned many times previously at shows and demos, is that better more revealing systems will often only serve to make most recordings sound worse.

Exactly!

An AM car radio serves songs better than a highly revealing system where the recording is poor.

Such a waste of Money!

I listen to mostly classical music, which you might think would be a natural for accurate reproduction of real instruments in a real space.  But even here, producers generally have a hand in “shaping” the music.  In the early days of stereo, an orchestra would be recorded with just two or three microphones placed in an optimum spot above or in front of the musicians.  This did  produce a natural sound which a high resolution audio system could come close to reproducing. Gradually, however, producers endeavored to “improve” the final sound by placing several microphones at various places above instrumental choirs, thereby giving them more control over the final product.  This multimiking caused several abnormalities in the natural sound. All sorts of distortions we’re now possible.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, though, because talented engineers have produced some wonderful results using this method.
I do  believe a high resolution stereo system should be. able to sound good on the majority of recordings. After all, even the worst engineers are not out to produce aberrant sounds.  Of course there are great variations in quality. But a good balanced audio system shouldn’t produce extreme distortions.