Is a highly discerning system enjoyable?

@erik_squires 

Funny you should bring up U2 War.

Always loved that record, until I bought a first UK pressing of it.

Realized that I’d only ever listened to it in a car, when the tracks happened to show up on the radio. Worked so well in the car. Not so great in my home set up which at the time was a tube integrated (Cary SLI-50) going into Decware DM946’s from a Clearaudio Concept.

Going to revisit it with the current set up which is completely different. DIY heavy plinth Lenco into upgraded Cary SLP-30 pre to DIY Hiraga Super 30 class a to DIY Seas coax sealed enclosures. 
 

Will be an interesting revisiting of War as this is a more revealing system, but also more musical to my ears than the previous set up.

Ok this thread made me give “War” a quick streaming.   Oh my! Glorious!    Who even knew all that was there!

The producer for U2 at the time and Pink Floyd had extremely divergent opinions of what to do with bass.  It is so incredibly apparent. 

I went for accuracy in my system because after all the (lost) years of listening to ‘lesser’ systems, I realized that all-the-while I listened I was filtering the sound through my imagination to render what I heard into what I knew (thought) it should sound like.

So now a bad recording sounds bad on my system; but then, it sounds the best it can sound, or maybe it’s best to say, I’m hearing all of it.

I recall my Dad’s Wharfedale W60Ds and a second-tier Pioneer integrated, and I don’t recall ever thinking, ‘what a terrible recording!”

I enjoyed my Dad’s system; it sounded warm and soft, often quite pretty, and all who heard it agreed.

But that system could not and cannot do what mine does: good recordings sound great and great recordings sound amazing.

It never caused me to search into the soundstage and marvel at the remarkable depth, or to ‘see’ the orchestra players in their correct positions, or to say out loud, ‘Wow!’ as I often do now.

@tomcy6 

"You can have a system that lets you hear every detail on a recording and also engages you emotionally, or you can have a system that gets all the detail but none of the emotion."

This approach is entirely incorrect.  Listening to an audio recording with no visuals,  all record of emotion in the performance is transmitted to us by the recording and our play-back system.  We can perceive emotion in the performance only by what we hear.  Therefore if we wish to obtain an authentic impression of the emotion it is essential our system is 'discerning' - OP means 'accurate', discernment is not within the province of inanimate equipment.

It is also essential the recording accurately reproduces the emotion in the original performance.  In many cases this does not occur and failings in the recording cannot be put right by even the most accurate system.  As @prndlus points out, where this occurs we have no way of knowing what was the emotion in the performance.  If you like, the original emotion is fixed but there are two variables and both have to be fixed before we can say anything about the original emotion.