better gear, worse recordings

I guess I did a poor job making my comments. I agree, we cannot re-tune instruments on a recording. I am not assuming that we know some (not all) instruments are out of tune. I am saying this recording is being used as our reference and we don't know some instruments are out of tune. If an orchestra is fine except the string basses are out of tune, it will just drive us nuts and we won't know why. The problem is hidden among the other instruments. Not everyone has good hearing for pitch; most of us don't, unless we are professional musicians, and then the off pitch is masked. The sound is not going to sound quite right, and we will try to tweek the system to make it sound better, not perfect. We'll never get there because of a few out of tune instruments.

I think some have asked what we use as a reference. I wonder how much time we all spend tweeking this and that, and the problem is not our systems, but the source material, whether some things out of tune, or just bright, dull, or poorly mixed. Garbage in, garbage out.

I enjoy reading the input of Audiophiles on Agon but have refraned from adding my input until now. I've helped many people assemble MUSICAL systems many of which were not aware of the pure enjoyment that could be derived from a well setup system. I think the lack of exposure to musical sound in a home setup is based in part to the recording engineers' lack of exposure to past formats which were more musical. Many of the newcommers in the recording industry have grown up in the DIGITAL era . Have they experenced musical bliss? Do they have a SOUND basis for designing musical recordings?
I also have experenced upgrades which have turned into sonic degration [as Sean]talks about in his above post.
His advice to use a controlable means and babby step approach to updates is well founded.

Excellent point Samg. The goal is a music system, not a sound system.

Interesting thread,I guess I'm with Kirk on his standpoint.
Although others make interesting points CFB,Finberg and Bomarc amongst them.
Being new to the audio game (maybe 5 years)but a big music fan for 21 years-I often find myself a bit baffled by the continious talk of bad recordings,I simply don't hear that many.
Of course I'm not suggesting there aren't bad recordings-either older ones or the odd new one that does sound overcompressed (U2's last springs to mind)but I guess I simply don't buy that much music that is prone to that type of production.
There is of course others that simply have a terrible production imho (The Strokes debut for example).
However to refocus totally on the original posting I have to say on my last upgrade-a new DAC, that so far I've yet to hear a single recording(CD's) from my collection that sounds worse however the presentation is different but it is in a positive way-I maybe not as discerning a listener as others and I guess at approx $7k my system isn't exactly at the top end.
Of course having a reasonable system does for example make Led Zeppelin 3 sound different than it did on my old mono record player in 1977 but I've never heard it sound better and if it does highlight flaws in the recording then somewhere in my brain is totally cancelled out by my love of the actual music.
I'm not sure if Peleon was at the wind up but you know he might actually have a point.
I find that when I listen to inferior systems to my own I'm nearly always surprised how much better it sounds than I expect but maybe that's because I'm not over analytical about how it sounds but rather what it's playing...

From my perspective, I cannot do anything about the quality of the CDs I love (except perhaps re-buying them over and over again, if possible, as they iterate up the higher-bit-mastering chain - which is kind of annoying and expensive - or waiting for broadband to deliver MP3-SACD++ on demand).

Therefore, I feel that the challenge is to construct (with a little help from friends... and you all here at Audiogon, AA, etc.) a system that reproduces real music at as high a resolution as possible, regardless of the quality of the input.

The resurgence of tubed equipment is in direct response to this problem (as mentioned above).

High-end CD players (Linn CD12 was the first, IMHO) are also finally being designed with the goal of playing non-audiophile CDs on audiophile systems.

Forgiving (but still high-resolution) speakers are also helping (especially as they are now often asked to reproduce video sound (TV and DVD) which is often worse than early 80 CDs)...for example the Revel Salon is able to sound detailed but 'never' harsh in the difficult to endure THX treble ranges (though, I believe for other reasons, it is not the most musical of speakers).

All this is to say, with all this good equipment available, I believe it is the system which is at fault if music does not sound musical and is not entertaining for both the analytical and emotional aspects of the listener.

Of course, because I personally do not care if the piano is 12 feet wide (I just imagine I am sitting 1 foot in front of it), or if the other aspects of the reproduction are not true to life (I have hardly EVER heard unamplified music other than a symphony or a guitar/banjo), I am perhaps more forgiving of unnatural effects than others may be (and techno and electronica are by definition unnatural :-).