Can a great system make a mediocre recording sound good?

I'd never want a system that could only sound great with the best recordings. To that end I've always voiced my systems to sound GOOD with mediocre recordings since this is where the vast majority of music resides. As I and others have mentioned, get the timbre, tonality right and  mediocre recordings can be involving, great recording simply follow along and become even more involving.

Mostly, I want my system to be musical, certainly I seek maximum resolution but not at the price of musical, I do believe these are not mutually exclusive goals.

a great system is a system that plays the music the owner likes to listen to beautifully... where different recordings have different qualities, it is up to the owner to construct the system to handle the range of variation ... numerous ways to meet this challenge... here is one...

A great system makes good recordings, sound amazing. Listening to anything not meeting that standard, will be played once and put back in its case. never to be heard again. 

Why is that? The Greatest performances can be on poor recordings. 

It’s true that a better system can make even the most poorly recorded, mixed, pressed album sound better, but it’s still not going to sound really good, only better.

JD

petg30 - I agree - we are going wrong, if we dont listen to great performances.

cd318 - thank you - i would emphasise my point a bit more. We had cheap but adjustable stands. In another system I use solid heavy stands for the small speakers, but these cannot be adjusted. The experiment with the A system showed that positioning, including height, toe-in, distance etc, means A LOT. And with a cheap height-adjustable stand, not so heavy, you can fine-tune the speaker position, before evt investing in a more expensive stand.

Headphone part of discussion; sadly I never really became friends with my Stax electrostat phones. Or with subdued Sennheisers or too analytical AKGs etc. For now, I've settled on Audioquest Nightowl and Nighthawk phones. These are very comfortable and forgiving, but offer a lot of musical information too.