I have been frustrated over this subject for quite some time. Many of us have invested (dare I say) tens of thousands of dollars into awesome audio systems, but the source of the music, the CD's are more often than not poorly engineered. The reason for this is simple: there's no profit incentive for the music companies to put out quality. The vast market for recorded music today is on MP3 - highly compressed and available directly through ones computer. The "artist" records the music and a minimal amount of engineering goes into the production of the final product. The market accepts this poor quality since it wants it on MP3 (where everything sounds lousy) and there aren't enough purchasers of CD's (who might actually care) to justify the added costs of making it sound correct.
I'm convinced we audiophiles are a dying breed... Ken