"Recordings that sound great on a high-end audio system means they won't sound very good on earbuds or Sonos speakers."
This viewpoint seems to answer the question of why many of today's commercial pop recordings don't appeal to us audiophiles. They were tuned specifically to work well on how their target audience will listen to them—a practice that I would absolutely support.
Anything less would be a disservice to the artists.
But the opposite—the idea of audiophile quality recordings sounding bad on that same low-end equipment is something I disagree with.
One does not equal the other.
A recording tuned specifically for earbuds likely won't sound good on a revealing system, but pop your earbuds in and give the San Francisco Symphony's Mahler collection a spin.
Great recordings sound great on any media.
Poor recordings might not make themselves so obvious on lesser equipment, but they are still poor recordings.
