How much is about the recording

...which partially explains why I listen so much more to my secondary outdoor system than I do my main rig...

I put together hyper critical systems for decades. I was chasing the Holy Grail, but my enjoyment was diminishing. Somewhere along this time I bought a cheap pair of Grado headphones and a portable CD player. The tunes were rocking. So, I decided to forget chasing the unachievable and tune my systems for my enjoyment. I can still play the super audiophile records with no excuses, but the rest of my recordings also sound great now and I have the music going all the time. 

@russ69 cheers to that!

Better recordings/masterings have been more important to me than anything other than loudspeakers for about 15 years now.

The Steve Hoffman Music Forum was invaluable in this regard, even if the Beatles threads literally took weeks to read.

More recently superdeluxeedition.com has also been helpful.

https://superdeluxeedition.com/

Then there is also the dynamic range database of course. It’s still helpful as ever during this era of loud/compressed music.

https://dr.loudness-war.info/

Andrew from Parlogram on YouTube is also good.

There must plenty of other sites too.

Yes, seriously. I have no idea about what system you have or how resolving it is. That is not my point. On many of the systems I’ve put together, I can get it to sound absolutely stunning using some very high-quality recordings and the right tune-up.

@russ69

What was tuned up? How was that done?
Are these systems super bright? Or what does resolving mean here?

Absolutely knock your socks off. But set up that way 99% of my music sounds like crap. That is not the right direction. You do what you can do to get 90% of the music you listen to sound good. A hot demo set-up only has limited function.

I have not set up systems like you describe, and it sounds like you have a lot more experience.

I usually put on a handful of recordings that I am familiar with, and they all either seem to sound great or they all seem to suck… I do not find that some sound much better, and some sound much worse.

Hence; I am wondering what is being done to get such a result.
(If nothing else I would likely want to avoid that.)

I'd also agree. But I do think it's possible to have a very revealing system and still listen to sub-optimal recordings and enjoy them. It's also highly dependent on the genre of music one listens to, I've found classical and jazz/blues to have the greatest delta of recording quality between poor vs. excellent.