Can a great system make a mediocre recording sound good?

I’ be been puzzling over this for years. One thing to help is to remember everyone on the other side, engineers, mixers, etc have all the control over this ‘Art’ they create. However, they can compromise for their perceived audience. Like any Art, a movie may be perfect for the cinema, but viewed from home may lack engagement or miss subtleties. If you can build your system toward coherence, soundstaging and try to get the bass right, then most recordings sound great. Some reveal real surprises, much as the artists intended. If the system is too imbalanced it can misemphasizes all those subtleties as irritants which is indeed hard to listen to. Most of these are dimensional cues and reverberations of the instruments, most ‘good sounding’ recordings isolate everything to remove any unwanted reverberations then add it back artificially. Musicians in a real room and all those reverberations actually sound good, so almost all blues and jazz and classical sounds fine. Rock is the culprit.  A car for example may be a good place to listen to that stuff because there’s so much competition you tend not to focus in those subtleties which make it more enjoyable. 

I think I said the same thing as @mahgister ha!

I think I said the same thing as @mahgister ha!

Yes we are on the same page...But you dont said exactlky the same thing...

But you add something very important which is one of the reason i did not listen rock music or pop... Unnatural studio mixing sound...

Then my observation from my last post was lacking this very important observation of yours that has nothing to do with the relation between an audio system and the room : the unnatural mixing technique in popular music... i forgot that most people listen much rock/pop ... 😁😊

You reminded me, and you are right to do so, that rock/pop is not classical nor jazz acoustically speaking...

I do not thought about that because i never listen rock/pop at all... 😁😊

My post is an example of a statement which cannot be completely right and can be misleading  because we dont listen all and everyone the same music genre...Then i correct here my last post because it can be acoustically misleading...

Then i will rewrite my post adding this : If some "bad" recording sound worst after you improve a piece of gear or the relation with the room, it is because gear or the relation with the room is not optimal at all...

But my observation is valid to all "naturally" recorded music with not much mixing...

In the case of pop/rock i dont think that my system room will improve a "bad" recording at all, in the contrary they will be worst, because it is the "bad" tricks of the mix which will become more disturbinglay audible in rock/pop music instead of the "natural" acoustical cues which are always improved by an optimized system/room relation in the case of a jazz or classical record album...

In this case only, "bad" recording may sound more acoustically interesting instead of worse when we improved the relation between the system/room....There is way less mixing imbalance to disturb our listening in jazz and classical...Almost all instruments are acoustical instruments not electrical one save by exception...

Then thanks for your post very important correction about mine...

All musical genres are not acoustically equal indeed....

my best to you ...

Most of these are dimensional cues and reverberations of the instruments, most ‘good sounding’ recordings isolate everything to remove any unwanted reverberations then add it back artificially. Musicians in a real room and all those reverberations actually sound good, so almost all blues and jazz and classical sounds fine. Rock is the culprit.

In a word: heavily mixed music (rock/pop) badly recorded cannot be redeem in any way...

In case of jazz and classical, the first lived  acoustical perspective, even if badly recorded, can be improved and made acoustically interesting by improving this second acoustical perspective : your room/system  translation ...