As system improves, do bad recordings sound worse?

I believe a bad recording is a bad recording, garbage in garbage out.
What recordings do you use when you are making changes (improvements) to your system? Do you use only the best recordings or do you use average recordings? The really exceptional recordings sound good on any system and when we compare the best recordings to average recordings it can be disappointing.
I believe everyone has experienced what you have mentioned here.
If we make an improvement and a group of recordings sound worse, did we really make an improvement?
I know a speaker manufacturer that would only use vinyl when designing his speakers. He said it was because vinyl sounded better. You can imagine how bad CDs sounded on those speakers. He finally realized he had to use both formats.
The same is true for evaluating our systems. We need to use a wide variety of recordings otherwise our music collection will shrink to a tiny handful of recordings.

Truly bad pop recordings of the late 1990s are digital horrors, many other recordings overused analog "improvements" such as reverb and sound phony, and early classical recordings lack the dynamics of real music. I think your question depends largely on what you listen to. Generally, I find that improvements in my system raise the level of virtually every records with the exception of those I listed above. I am not saying, of course, that now poorly recorded material rivals well recorded music.

hi byron:

the issue is what is meant by "improves" and what is considered a "good" system.

i believe that audio is a subjective hobby so what constitutes "improvement" is a matter of personal taste.

if improvement=greater resolution , while maintaining a balanced frequency response, i maintain that recordings which are engineered to have a peak in say the range, 1000 -3000 hz, will sound more fatiguing.

i did raise this question as almarg has indicated but i was a bit vague about what constitutes a poor recording.

i am trying to be more specific by saying recordings having frequency response errors will, in a better system, as i have implied be exposed to a greater extent than in another system with certain colorations.

"As system improves, do bad recordings sound worse?"

In my experience, most definitely yes.

As system improves, do bad recordings sound worse?

In my experience, yes.