Does it have to sound good for you to like it?

It's interesting how varied our preferences for music can be. The experience of music is deeply personal and subjective, influenced by many factors including the melody, lyrics, and the emotional connection we have with a song.

For some, the quality of the voice and the production value are paramount, while for others, the emotional or thematic content of the music can outweigh technical considerations. My son's great tolerance for low-resolution, unconventional music highlights how diverse and individualized musical tastes can be. Platforms like Spotify cater to this diversity by offering a vast range of music that appeals to different tastes and preferences.

Ultimately, whether one values high sound quality or meaningful content, music remains a powerful form of expression that resonates differently with each listener. It's this variety in taste that makes music such a rich and universal art form.

If it is bad enough I cannot listen for very long.

However, last night, in the course of auditioning/breaking in a pair of new speakers I started with Witches Bew (the Living Stereo 24 bit disc, NOT the SACD) and it sounded pretty good to me (and I am not a really a fan of classical, which may say something about the speakers). While that disc was playing, the desire to hear Lou Reed sing Sweet Jane came over me (". . . those were different times . . .") so I put on Rock And Roll Animal. The quality of that is on the rough side, but for the reasons @mrdecibel frequently cites, I got into it. However, with that last sentence typed, I probably wouldn’t want to listen to too many hours in a row with that quality.

I used to listen to poorer quality recordings when my gear was in the living room and I would be doing other things while jamming out and not paying as much attention to detail. After I moved to a smaller dedicated room there are no distractions but that has a price. For me, anyway, it does.

Besides, that's when true audiophile rig shows real class - when it achieves an impossible task of making poor recordings sound tolerable.

Actually, @inna  , what my experience has been is that the better my system became, the less tolerable poor recordings/ masterings became.  Perhaps we are defining the word "better" differently.  

@soix for you :

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/ewryuajc58j4dpz0t06og/h?rlkey=43h8t7huoafmw8rlyoxb4vps3&dl=0

Of course the music has to sound great. Why spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on equipment if a car radio is good enough? On the other hand, who wants to listen to music beautifully rendered if you don’t like it? The other aspect is how distracted do you get when the production quality is good but not great? I get too distracted by that for my own good.