I do not subscribe to the theory that the better the Hi-Fi, the worse poorly mastered CDs sound. In my experience the opposite is true. On poorly matched systems, bad mastering does indeed become fatiguing and painful. When you have a well matched setup, you do, of course, STILL hear far more of the music. I do not own an unlistenable CD and none are fatiguing, even some well publicised turkeys.
Someone mentioned earlier that perhaps one in ten CDs were audiophile quality, well not in my world :)! Perhaps we listen to different genres? On my RYM page I list audiophile quality CDs - I have 98 audiophile CDs out of 3322 currently catalogued. I still have to re-assess quite a number but I would hazard a guess that only 3-4% are of a high quality. I also have around 500 "remastered" CDs and only about 50 of those are what I would term audiophile quality. I would say, in defence of current issuing policies, that I believe the backlash that I'm sure we have all witnessed in recent years, regarding the state of modern mastering/remastering, has had a knock-on effect on record labels, certainly the smaller independent ones. Lots of recent re-issues have been very good indeed.
Someone mentioned earlier that perhaps one in ten CDs were audiophile quality, well not in my world :)! Perhaps we listen to different genres? On my RYM page I list audiophile quality CDs - I have 98 audiophile CDs out of 3322 currently catalogued. I still have to re-assess quite a number but I would hazard a guess that only 3-4% are of a high quality. I also have around 500 "remastered" CDs and only about 50 of those are what I would term audiophile quality. I would say, in defence of current issuing policies, that I believe the backlash that I'm sure we have all witnessed in recent years, regarding the state of modern mastering/remastering, has had a knock-on effect on record labels, certainly the smaller independent ones. Lots of recent re-issues have been very good indeed.