Wow! Gorgeous looking horns in your avatar...made me salivate and lose my focus for a moment
But sure, I would argue most recordings suck. We have had the loudness wars for the last 20 years or so, and pop / rock recordings over that time period are victims. Much of rock and blues in the seventies and eighties sucks.
A couple of specific examples: Mike Bloomfield Live at the Old Waldorf is okay - it can sound decent and be emotionally moving in the right system, but not all systems.
Brian Setzer Orchestra Live - The Ultimate collection just sucks. So do many Delmark and Alligator records recordings. Just too many exampels
Caesar, I get the impression you're a bit uncertain what your real concern is but here you seem to zero in on your perceived crux of the matter. You say here most recordings suck, loudness wars, most rock and blues of the 70's and 80's suck, etc.
I doubt a more resolving higher-end speaker will make things sound worse. Well, except for one case and that is where the components are so overloaded with distortions and a given speaker for the most part just speaks what it's told to speak.
But that's the universal problem we all face to one good degree or another as perhaps any reasonable or better speaker is for the most part sonically translating / converting the input signal provided up stream. And whether it's music or distortions, a speaker should rarely if ever discriminate between music signals and distortion signals cuz it's all just input as far as the speaker is concerned.
Your argument here is that most recordings suck. In contrast, I would argue most recordings are surprisingly good to spectacular even those deemed by some to be inferior-engineered recordings. What could possibly explain our potentially diametrically opposed views? There's a number of questions and potential answers that could be bantered but I suspect one of us may not be asking the right questions.
It seems you've found yourself in a bit of a dilemma here. If indeed you're convinced that highly resolving higher-end speakers make playback music sound even worse, then the only logical conclusion would be to downgrade, right? But wouldn't that go against the grain of high-end audio's existence as an industry / hobby?
What I find interesting is that you blame speakers for being too resolving and you blame the recordings for being too poorly engineered. Yet, you seem to have dismissed everything in between as playing any kind of role in this significant apparent lack of musicality.
At the very least, I'm guessing you're not giving serious enough consideration to the bulk of the playback vineyard which is everything between the speaker and the recording.
