Can a great system make a mediocre recording sound good?

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.

The trouble with this "it's not the system it's the room" argument is that the good recordings and the mediocre recordings are both being played in the same room. Moreover, it is the same room as my upgraded-from system. I fail to see what difference the room would make in comparing one recording to another in the same room. Judging from what some people spend on gear I'm sure some of them could afford different rooms to listen to different records, but that is not a lead I am in. A better system makes all recordings sound better than they were, but they all finish in the same order as before in terms of recording quality.

The Ry Cooder record is indeed a good choice, but I made it back in the 1970s when I bought it. Speaking of good choices, one thing I learned now that I have heard just about all of the original versions of the songs he covered, that whatever you think of him as a musician, he sure knew how to pick them. Something very interesting could be written about folk singers as music critics, based on their choice of material. 

The ultimate example of the difference digital mastering can make is a comparison of the first, second and third generations of the Complete Robert Johnson, the last of which is an absolute revelation. I think they might have had the original metal parts for that one. The ultimate test would be if someone had a pristine set of original 78s to compare it with, possibly to be found next to the Arc of the Covenant in that big warehouse at the end of the Indiana Jones movie.