Can a great system make a mediocre recording sound good?

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

Systems that scrape every last detail off of whatever media you have tend to overemphasize higher frequency detail… which ends up being unnaturally harsh and details are highlighted. These systems either just make bad recordings sound bad but also distract from good recordings. This is one of the many balancing acts in building and upgrading your system. A bit more emphasis on musicality and a bit less on detail scraping and you have a system that makes nearly everything sound great. It took me decades to get there, but finally arrived. See my UserID for my system.

Find someone with some omnidirectional speakers e.g. ohm, or open baffles or wide dispersion box speakers take a listen and decide for yourself.  You will get a different experience than the typical box speaker.