better gear, worse recordings

I don't have any recordings or experiences where I said, "huh, I really liked the way that sounded before I upgraded, but now with a higher resolution system it doesn't sound as good to me." I do find that as my system evolves and (hopefully) improves, I realize that there is music that I like that doesn't warrant sitting there "critically" listening on a high end rig. But, in these cases (for me anyway), it didn't warrant it on a lesser system either. I might have hoped that it would improve, that what didn't seem like a good recording might fare better on a better system, and it just didn't work out.

An experience I do have, regularly, is realizing that there is music that is not stellar in it's recording quality but that I like a lot, so I listen to it when I'm not critically listening, either up walking around, in my office, in my car.

Maybe I'm just justifying the continual improvement of my system, but I find that each improvement makes a good portion of my music sound better and be more enjoyable to listen to or neither betters or worsens it, but does not make anything less enjoyable than it was. -Kirk

I guess I did a poor job making my comments. I agree, we cannot re-tune instruments on a recording. I am not assuming that we know some (not all) instruments are out of tune. I am saying this recording is being used as our reference and we don't know some instruments are out of tune. If an orchestra is fine except the string basses are out of tune, it will just drive us nuts and we won't know why. The problem is hidden among the other instruments. Not everyone has good hearing for pitch; most of us don't, unless we are professional musicians, and then the off pitch is masked. The sound is not going to sound quite right, and we will try to tweek the system to make it sound better, not perfect. We'll never get there because of a few out of tune instruments.

I think some have asked what we use as a reference. I wonder how much time we all spend tweeking this and that, and the problem is not our systems, but the source material, whether some things out of tune, or just bright, dull, or poorly mixed. Garbage in, garbage out.

I enjoy reading the input of Audiophiles on Agon but have refraned from adding my input until now. I've helped many people assemble MUSICAL systems many of which were not aware of the pure enjoyment that could be derived from a well setup system. I think the lack of exposure to musical sound in a home setup is based in part to the recording engineers' lack of exposure to past formats which were more musical. Many of the newcommers in the recording industry have grown up in the DIGITAL era . Have they experenced musical bliss? Do they have a SOUND basis for designing musical recordings?
I also have experenced upgrades which have turned into sonic degration [as Sean]talks about in his above post.
His advice to use a controlable means and babby step approach to updates is well founded.

Excellent point Samg. The goal is a music system, not a sound system.

Interesting thread,I guess I'm with Kirk on his standpoint.
Although others make interesting points CFB,Finberg and Bomarc amongst them.
Being new to the audio game (maybe 5 years)but a big music fan for 21 years-I often find myself a bit baffled by the continious talk of bad recordings,I simply don't hear that many.
Of course I'm not suggesting there aren't bad recordings-either older ones or the odd new one that does sound overcompressed (U2's last springs to mind)but I guess I simply don't buy that much music that is prone to that type of production.
There is of course others that simply have a terrible production imho (The Strokes debut for example).
However to refocus totally on the original posting I have to say on my last upgrade-a new DAC, that so far I've yet to hear a single recording(CD's) from my collection that sounds worse however the presentation is different but it is in a positive way-I maybe not as discerning a listener as others and I guess at approx $7k my system isn't exactly at the top end.
Of course having a reasonable system does for example make Led Zeppelin 3 sound different than it did on my old mono record player in 1977 but I've never heard it sound better and if it does highlight flaws in the recording then somewhere in my brain is totally cancelled out by my love of the actual music.
I'm not sure if Peleon was at the wind up but you know he might actually have a point.
I find that when I listen to inferior systems to my own I'm nearly always surprised how much better it sounds than I expect but maybe that's because I'm not over analytical about how it sounds but rather what it's playing...