Should a good system sound bad with bad recording?

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.

200 MB for a two hour concert simply must have some audio compression to compromise the music. The most common compression schemes for full WAV files (SHN and FLAC) can sometimes get over 50 per cent reduction in size, but that is generally when the music is sparse enough to allow for it. And Pearl Jam is not exactly known for a lot of air between the music. Since a one hour CD generally contains about 600 MB of music, I'd expect a two hour rock concert compressed with a "lossless" compression scheme to be more like 600 MB.

I'd say that Pearl Jam compromized the audio quality so the download time was a reasonable size for the average downloader. If the same concert were available as a CD, which Pearl Jam has done in the past, I'd expect it to have better sound quality.

i thought we were talking about the version on a commercially available cd, not the internet download.