Quality system, make poor recordings sound better?

Also, one major issue I have regarding recording quality and instruments is that I am well familiar with how vocals, and instruments are suppose to sound. I played concert violin, sax, and other instruments in band and orchestra. It literally will drive me out of the room if the sound isn't close to what it is suppose to sound like. Take the recording equipment, cables, mixing boards (that included really bad circuitry), mikes, etc. and remember that all of that adds distortion, then take the compression and distortions inherent with bad Cd recordings, and the music just won't sound right. Using electronic drums, electronic instruments trying to sound like real violins, etc. and it hurts my ears. So, yes, in my opinion, I don't really care if I like the artist or not. If it is recording badly or using really terrible sounding instrumentation, I don't like listening to it. I went to a concert a little while ago at Red Rock Colorado (wonderful place) to see the Doobie (spelling) brothers and the Steve Miller Band. Each artist brought their own amplification and mikes on stage when they performed. The Doobie Brothers sounded absolutely great. But, the Steve Miller Band (who I really wanted to see/hear) sounded really terrible. It sounded muffled, heavily distorted and the sound engineer could not fix it. Several of us walked out of the venue totally disappointed. Same is true of recorded music. I don't care who it is. If it sounds bad, I either won't buy it or won't listen to it. It hurts my ears and life is too short for that. I want to enjoy my music, not sit there wondering what is wrong.

enjoy

Montytx,
A recurring theme with this type of topic is the detrimental effects of dynamic compression. This is often genre dependent, with popular and rock music suffering this more frequently. Jazz and classical recordings seem for the most part to avoid/ minimize dynamic compression nonsense. Most of my jazz CDs have a dynamic range averaging 25-30 db and some are 35-40 db with individual selections. It seems many pop and rock recordings are limited to 10-12 db range which is regrettable. I suspect that the good classical CDs are wide dynamic range recordings similar to the jazz genre. So it appears the recording engineers target certain markets by assuming what playback equipment the listeners will use, ipods, boombox, car and portable radios etc.
Charles,

My experience mirrors OP, Almarg ... In a high resolution system, one can hear the flaws in poor recordings. For me, the most obvious is compression, brightness and thinness.

11-06-14: Maplegrovemusic
can someone who feels as the op provide us with a recording you think is poor . i would like to play it through my system

Most Bruce Springsteen, Heart (Heart, Bad Animals ...), Liz Phair, Garbage V2.0 ...

Knight- Dreamboat Annie on Mushroom records, which I think is a KenDun master is actually a great sounding record.

The Dreamboat Annie masters were excellent. Nautilus did what I think was the best pressing of that album. Still my go-to for demoing Rock bass resolution(the synth & drum/Fender bass doubling on Magic Man)