Is Recording quality the real culprit?

Album quality is of course hit or miss, depending on who the recording engineer was, the producer, the mixing and mastering engineer, and the label. Ironically most young artists don’t have a clue and go with the flow of whatever those with "supposedly" better technical knowledge tell them. [I still wonder why Adele’s "30" sounds so bad].

Steve Gutenberg recently mentioned that a 1959 live recording of Harry Belafonte sounds "audiophile" with a great soundstage and imaging, along with dynamics, while a 1970s recording of Al Kooper sounds compressed to hell, but both can be enjoyed.

I mean yeah you can eat a quality steak, but you can still enjoy hamburger. You just have to let go of the idea that everything is going to sound great.

Many popular albums for whatever reason, done in the 1970s are "thin" sounding. I can usually make these sound a bit fuller with a touch of EQ and I do. At least in the 1970s most of the albums weren’t compressed to hell as happened later on during the evil spawn from Hell, ’loudness wars’ done for freaking AM and FM radio.

Think of your audio system as a TV. Maybe 8K and maybe you have it tweaked to the best picture quality it is technically capable of, but then you watch something like The Blair Witch Project that was recorded on a VCR with 240 lines of resolution. LOL. No, you can’t polish a turd, and if you try, you most likely won’t like the result.

@searchingforthesound 

I don’t want to wonder into a fight, but an equalizer will do nothing for an over driven microphone, to much compression, or tape hiss. If someone wants to put EQ into their system, more power to them.

In my experience all recordings sound better on a good system than a poor system.

My system is pretty resolving and has cause me to understand there are a lot of crap recordings out there

Music is an art.  So is the mastering that goes into making recordings.  Everyone does it differently.  
 

Science and technology provides the tools used to both create and playback recordings.    That part is not an art.   There are right ways and wrong ways to do it.  
 

If it’s done right, you get to hear all the artistry that went into making a recording.   You can also then season to taste so that as a whole it sounds good to you.