Should a good system sound bad with bad recording?

perfectionist is right. your stereo should accurately capture the performance and the recording itself. most recordings are meant to sound 'like recordings'. does anyone really think bernstein or the beatles and thousands of relavent recording artists were/are even concerned about 'air' and 'warmth' and all the other bs terms that equipment mongers use. a good stereo system makes you want to own the world's largest music collection. if you spend all your time worrying about each recording being a sonic wonder, you need a doctor, not an upgrade. to paraphrase woody guthie...'some men rob you with a gun, others with interconnects'.......for the most part neither man winds up being a scientist,an engineer, or even a music lover.

I agree with most of you guys even if you are saying opposite things! I for one do not give much about PRAT and other marketing buzz words and I want my system to show what's in the recording yet still make it enjoyable - overall.

HOWEVER, the Pearl jam bootleg recording I was exposed to last week was really inaudible, or should I say, very hard to appreciate as it did not sound like live recording to me, totally muffled and cacophonous. Without knowing about its resolution or else at the time, I immediately thought this was a case of highly compressed files. Jaybo: how could a decent system make these files "good" if they are, by definition, of lesser quality than the average definition that our systems were designed for? think of it like cars and roads. The average car is designed for average road qualities. If you take that car and take it in serious off-roads condition, it ain't good at all. It does not mean the car is poorly designed, it is simply out of the range of application it was designed for.

Is it possible there is a compression range that manufacturers use when designing audio gear? Is it possible that those bootleg recordings sit outside that range?

This appears to be a classic case of finger pointing. On one hand it's the recording engineers fault, on the other hand it's the home audio manufacturers fault, on the other hands it's the consumers fault, on the other hand it's the reviewers fault. I can't help but wonder if they are intertwined. The recording engineer gears the sound to the lowest common denominator such as boom boxes, walkmans and car audio to make his recodings more appealing to a greater audience to encourage more sales. The high end audio manufacturer gears their sound to be accurate reproducers of the recording to make his products more appealing to a narrower audience willing to pay extra for greater fidelity. The consumer gets frustrated that their expensive gear makes for some unpleasent sounds and blames the manufacturer to whom they gave the most money. On the other, other hand perhaps the consumer should be blamed for poor judgment in purchasing power and buying both compromised equipment that initiates this diabolical cycle and buying compromised recordings that maintains this diabolical cycle? On the other, other, other, hand perhaps record reviwers (I mean the ones that don't just cater to high end equipment publications) are to blame for not giving enough credence to the intrinsic quality of the very vehicle that transports the subject matter? Just don't blame me, it's his fault!

Jaybo:
Some excellent comments about speakers (I own one of the offending kind at present).

The following I also agree with heartily:

"your stereo should accurately capture the performance and the recording itself. most recordings are meant to sound 'like recordings'. does anyone really think bernstein or the beatles and thousands of relavent recording artists were/are even concerned about 'air' and 'warmth' and all the other bs terms that equipment mongers use. a good stereo system makes you want to own the world's largest music collection."

But dismissing pace and timing?! You loose me entirely. The redundant (but now widely used) acronym "PRAT" may have originally been coined in someone's marketing department, but the phenomenon it attempts to describe is not only tangible, it is at the backbone of ALL good music production AND reproduction. In music production, timing is largely what differentiates great musicians from the lesser (just ask yourself what makes for great blues guitar, and you’ll see what I mean). In a hi-fi, good timing is essential to, as you put it, "accurately capture the performance and the recording itself." This is an area expensive, audiophile systems fall short frequently, especially, but not exclusively, tube based ones. No, this is much more than "intangible marketing 101." Given your otherwise sensible comments, I find your position on this quite puzzling.

'prat' is like an audio 'farfegnugen'. it is a marketing idea that is beyond debate. its a clever way of expressing a 'faith-based' feeling. mac has always used "pride of ownnership"......its pretty hard to quantify or argue. your mindset determines prat. it also determines what is 'cool'. a case in point is an LS3/5a of any origin. even though this design is legendary from any brand , the rogers version is 'beyond' legendary.