The 1st CD's of Alice Cooper's "Welcome to my Nightmare" (Mid 1980's) may have been "TECHNICALLY" higher fidelity to the source material but sounded horrible when compared to the Album which was technically Lower Fidelity but had MUCH higher sound quality
Some of the original all digital recordings did sound like crap. One particular standout was Bruce Springsteen's, "The River". <(actually AAD in the case of a vinyl record) It was shrill, tinny, and annoying.
AC/DC's "Giving the dog a bone" on their first CD sounds VERY bad, yet with minor Impact restoration, ambient tweaks and a bit-o EQ, a 128KBPS MP3 can sound much better than the uncompressed source material that it came from even though the MP3 is technically lower fidelity and adds noise
Yeah well, people used to, and likely still do, mistake high frequency noise for high frequency music. I think the people you know more than, Dolby labs, proved that a long tine ago.
Males and females hear sound differently, and have different hearing curves. Sonically speaking, "what's sauce for the goose, isn't necessarily sauce for the gander".
Generally speaking, more open music records better than heavily instrumented and over compressed material. A lot of the direct to CD stuff from the 90's in Nashville was spectacularly well produced and recorded. OTOH, Today's Carrie Underwood has been not doing much more than screaming through her last several albums.
Modern recording technique differs little from the crap advertisers have been inflicting on us since the invention of TV. If you modulate the transmitter output more than 100%, .then your power output at the antenna will be over FCC limits. Enter the compressor, push the soft sounds up enough, and your commercial will be 5 times as loud as the program.
I only tolerate headphones, but love decent loudspeakers. The act of sound going through a certain distance in air, mitigates the transient response a bit, and provides a bit more reality
As for Dolby surround.....
I invented a superior format before Dolby came along with an inferior clone
I just don't know what to say here.