Your system quality vs. recording quality

Recordings are what they are. The big audiophile money hole is thinking the right system will make everything sound wonderful. It won’t. It can only give you more of what’s there and what’s there can vary from horrific to mesmerizing.   If most recordings make you want to listen more and not chase you away then you are in good territory. 

After listening to speakers with different dispersion patterns I'm fairly convinced that some recordings sound better with a narrower dispersion speaker, or a highly absorptive, well damped space. Other recordings seem to benefit from more ambience in the listening space. I also think it is possible for a more revealing system to make a recording that you used to like seem less enjoyable. Some recordings seem to sound no better through exotic speakers than through an old transistor table top radio. On a good system the contrast in sound quality between recordings is more striking, upping expectations and making low quality recordings more disappointing. You can't even tell stereo from mono recordings on a limited frequency response table top radio. 

I’d rather have my system reveal as much as good recordings have to offer rather than try to polish the turds out there.  For the turds, I pretty much enjoy them on my Amazon Echo or similar device deserving of such quality. 

Profoundly sad that SQ from the Beatles is not as good as it deserves. So much goodness, and remastering didnt achieve much. And yet there are albums from the past that do indeed sound quite good. Same thing can be said for Grateful Dead album SQ, although they are ok. Linda Ronstadt albums are quite good. 

Sadly, So many great albums from the 70s used to sound a lot better when the age of audiophile technological advancement and awareness had not fully arrived and was not so widespread. We may need our older systems for recordings from this past age that treated the recordings a lot better; these classic albums have no place in modern era systems.

+1 Mapman. And there is are many releases that suffer from poor recording and/or production. Some of my favorites are those recorded 'live' in the studio.