What to do with bad recorded CDs


When I upgraded to Mcintosh and Accuphase - Kef speaker system, I am in heaven for the first time I started this hobby a decade ago.

I found my-self not even breathing, to capture every bit of nuance of the music... It was a great moment for me - and I am a professional musician. Rarely do I encounter such moments in live music !

Good Hifi can equal if not better live performance - for me.

But alas, heaven turned into he-- when I put on badly recorded materials. It revealed bad CDs to the point of me wanting to throw them away.

What do audiophiles do about that ? Go back to a lesser system to play these ? Or should I throw away great portion of my collection ?
gonglee3
For me its simply, the better the quality of speaker, the better the speaker makes the lesser engineered cd sound.
I guess I mean by un-refined, voices that are husky in an unpleasant way - brought out by a revealing hifi system.

In a lesser system, they sounded tolerable, but not on a better system.

I might try different speaker as Godbless suggested.

Thank you again for all the insightful inputs...

For the bad recorded CDs for which I dont like the music either, they go on Ebay. If I like the music, I try to find a remastered version
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.