The question assumes that there is an independent metric by which to judge a recording's quality as good or bad besides listening to it on a stereo system. If a recording is predetermined as a Bad Recording then it will always be a Bad Recording regardless of the stereo; that is, until such time as someone listens to it and judges it to be a Good Recording. A truly stereo-system-independent metric is difficult to imagine, but not impossible. For example, you could observe the recording being made, and using your own previous experience and biases, deduce that the methods used by the recordist are going to be inferior. You could observe a physical medium like a record with extensive scratches and assume it will sound bad when played back. However, that would account only for the media flaws and not any flaws in the original electrical signal. In practice the most common way to distill any inherent quality of a recording is to determine if its traits maintain themselves across multiple stereo systems. Of course the stereo systems' quality themselves are simultaneously being judged by the recordings they are fed. This complex reciprocal system helps to keep recording makers, players and listeners in a perpetual state of activity, a circle if you will, an audiocircle.
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