[The recording of KL] responds very well to my tinkering around with bass and treble on my PEQ-1. I can make it sound excellent. Therefore it is not an inherently bad recording.
If we said that a certain brand of ground beef responded well to a lot of seasoning and bbq sauce, it would seem sensible to conclude that the meat must not be very good to require all that fussing. The analogy holds, in my view, for KL.
Perhaps we can meat (!) in the middle and agree that KL is not a "bad" recording but it has a lot of room for improvement. If you're good at tinkering with the sound using your PEQ, then it would be interesting to see how good you could make the *new* version of KL. There seems to be a broad consensus that it's meat of a higher grade.