Can a great system make a mediocre recording sound good?

I listen to all of my music on hand (vinyl collection).  There are definitely some better sounding records than others.  There are incredible sounding records, too.  And there are a few that are just terrible sounding.  I still listen to all of it.  However, those lesser sounding records just sound better to my ears when the volume is adjusted accordingly.  That is to say, for lesser quality recordings I listen with the volume lower than I do for the high-quality recordings.  It seems to work better for my ears and allows me to have a more enjoyable listening session.

My system is quite good and is revealing, and my room is fairly well treated.  I get from the records what they have to offer.  Again, I adjust the volume accordingly and enjoy my record collection in its entirety.

Definitely yes, but better recording always will sound better. :)

I have a big investment in my front end. But the most significant improvement came when I added another $10K to my $3K cartridge. (Analog only system-Lyra Atlas SL) Granted, the rest of my system was up to the level of the Lyra.

It pulled so much more information out of the groves that almost every LP now, at least, sounded interesting and listenable. Now, only the rate exceptional LP sounded “bad”.

IME, there is no question that the better the system, the better the sound.

However, I also believe that a system must be at a certain level to reap these rewards.

@heretobuy 

very good choise playing some young Ry Cooder. Not bad, not mediocre, just very fine recordings and music. Classics.

@clearthinker

Therefore a system could be designed that would process poor recordings to sound like good ones. But the changes made would render the performance different from the original recording.

Isn’t this also what modern TVs do?

Re-interpretate and reimagine the signal being fed into them?

When you look at some of the new OLED screens, they are indeed impressive, but you would have call them realistic.

Hyper-realistic, maybe.

@sns

Poor recordings remain poor, no help can be found for these.

Agreed.

Perhaps the best thing to do with those is ( the vast majority) is to downscale the playback equipment to something with reduced bandwidth, scale and resolution, a bit like using soft focus photography, where they may appear benign and acceptable.

Aren’t these low bandwidth, low resolution recordings always likely to sound better on equipment such as boomboxes, car stereos, jukeboxes and smartphones rather than high resolution, high bandwidth equipment that they were never designed for?

In fact, just how many producers (Joe Meeek, Jerry Wexler, Phil Spector, George Martin, Brian Wilson, Mickie Most, Brian Eno, Quincy Jones, Rick Rubin etc) even considered audiophiles in mind when they were recording?

I’d argue that when it comes to audio resolution is clearly a two edged sword, and that is precisely why some of us attach far more importance to the faithful reproduction of timbre.

All recordings benefit from this but not all systems can deliver.