Can a great system make a mediocre recording sound good?

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.

its funny 

there was a thread not long ago about what is an audiophile vs a music lover...

think the answer is right here

I like the question.  My bias would be to answer "No" but as my system gets better and I pull CDs off the shelf that I do not have fond memories of I hfind they are more listenable