"Bridge Over Trouble Water" sounds artificial

Hmm, well semantics aside, I find it sounds better and not great but good enough to be enjoyable on my good system with room for the "ambience" to breath than on headphones (Chord Mojo to Sony MDR-1AM2).

So I don’t agree with the assertion it sounds "worse" on a good system. In fact there is a lot more to potentially enjoy if you are into it.

I will agree it is not an "audiophile/reference" recording, but I don’t think anyone ever claimed it was.

Roy Halee produced Simon & Garfunkel both Live in Central Park and BOTW.  The Live album is much better in every way.

Roy Halee basically made a career out of producing Simon & Garfunkel, Paul Simon, and his wife Edie Brickell. I don't think aside from that he has any remarkable credentials as a producer of audiophile recordings. That being said, the more spare recordings of acoustic guitars and Paul & Art's vocals etc sound very good, but once Roy starts on the "wall of sound" like the end of "The Boxer" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water" it gets quite messy. 

It’s an annoying recording that gets more annoying the higher the resolution of the playback system.  Unless that whole echoey bathroom with reverb thing gets you off.

I keep waiting for this thread to die but it won’t. I grew up in the ’70’s. I confess to having once owned S+G’s album-whichever one had this song on it. When I started college in the fall of ’77, the very first day I had moved into my dorm, I pitched the album out the window of my dorm room on the 20th floor. I did not want my roommates to think I was a douche. I will never forget that there were throngs of students and volunteers moving all their things into the dorm that day and this record careened in the wind like a meteor right at some hapless kid’s head. I had visions of it hitting him in the jugular and my being arrested for involuntary manslaughter. Imagine the irony of losing your life due to a flying record that has "Bridge Over Troubled Water" on it. At the last second, it missed him by inches and I immediately made a note not to try that stupid stunt again. I got rid of a Dan Fogelberg record too that day. Into a dumpster this time. And my copy of the America record that was ubiquitous, the one with "Horse with no Name" on it. But not my Peter Frampton "Frampton Comes Alive". I held onto that for a while longer. And I was a nerd myself, having every single Jethro Tull record ever released rather than just the three good ones-the earliest releases.