Is Recording quality the real culprit?

You get a good quality system to better appreciate the musical performance.  The recording quality is not the main focus. 

Poor recording or mastering  makes a good musical performance sound crappy.

It may sound crappy, but it's still a good musical performance.

BINGO! Blaring Sirens going off. DING DING DING! You win the big prize. Bigtwin is correct and so are you. I have had media in different formats. CD, Vinyl and tape recordings, BUT the most glaring and obvious quality differences has been heard in the recordings themselves. The artist, the sound engineer, the label and many other factors play a role. In fact, some music artists have really spent more time in the studio, think Steely Dan, Boston, Diana Krall, Pink Floyd and many, many others. Think of some great audio masters like Rudy Van Gelder, Lee Herschberg, Elliot Scheiner, Bruce Swedien, Geoff Emerick, Don Landee, Alan Parsons, Ken Scott, Todd Rundgren, George Martin, Quincy Jones, Tom Dowd, Phil Spector, Bob Clearmountain, Bernie Grundman, Brian Wilson, Eddy Kramer, Tom Scholz, Trevor Horn.

Consider yourself lucky when you mention many artists do things well when it comes to recording quality. In my experience it is unfortunately the other way around. I venture that less than 20% of music recorded between the sixties and today are what I consider well recorded. And I'm very generous. But that still makes for thousands of great albums, it's just a huge undertaking to find them.