Quality system, make poor recordings sound better?

There really is a choice to be made when assembling a system. It's an age old argument in audio. Do you want to see the tree or the details on the leaves? It's an individual choice.

If your goal is towards components that are accurate and precise then only high quality recordings will sound good and you will tend to only listen to 50 or so recording that sound good. Reason why, your system will tend to emphasize details revealing anomalies in poor recordings. Such systems will tell you more about the recording process than about musical intention.

If, on the other hand, your goal was toward a musical system then a wider variety of recordings will tend to sound good. Here the emphasis is not on detail and accuracy but on flow, coherence, liquidity and other musical traits. This doesn't mean that the system is not detailed or accurate it's just that these traits aren't being emphasized.

Both approaches tend towards extremes and ideally you may want to walk a fine line between the two.

This phenomena is something us old-timers have been discussing for decades. This suggests to me that the OP might be a relative newcomer to the hobby. IMO there's 2 schools of thought. The 1st being that a system can be so ruthlessly revealing that it reveals all the shortcomings inherent in the original recordings. The 2nd being that a system has a, for lack of a better word, 'euphonic' sound quality that helps the overall sound of any recording. These are 2 extremes with most systems falling somewhere 'in between'. The debate has raged about accuracy vs. musicality forever and will continue to do so but I think it all comes down to personal taste and the gear one buys based on those preferences. The thought just occurred to me that I learned so much about all this stuff from Harry Pearson during the 80's when I 1st got into this hobby. Thx HP, RIP!

" It would be kind of a foolish hobby to end up with an expensive system that makes the majority of your record collection sound bad."

I agree. If it can't get the most out of whatever you got, what's the point? Fortunately, it can. If it doesn't, then there is something else going on. The possibilities there are endless. Only a few ways to get things right, many ways to get things wrong.

Alot of studios use ATC scm50 monitors that cost over 20k . So all this talk about studios using inferior equipment is not true . The founder of Stereophile magazine stated the ATC were the closest thing to live sound he heard in his home.

Try listening between 2 and 4 AM, least electrical junk on line most places.