Quote Originally Posted by barry.d.hunt View Post
Hi Stan,

I think you might have misunderstood what I meant by ‘attending concerts’. I did in fact mean un-amplified acoustic performances, such as orchestral, chamber, choral or folk. I regard these as the only reference one can have to use to set up a ‘bench mark’ when building a system.

I agree that pop and rock concerts have the singers miked up as well as the guitar amplifiers and keyboards, and so the presentation is largely down to the skill of the sound engineer at the venue. This also applies to jazz concerts where there is often amplified support of the acoustic instruments.

And of course any studio recording of a performance comes to us ‘courtesy’ of the recording engineers who miked up the artist, made the original multi tracked tapes, which are then mixed down to the master tape. We have no idea what it sounded like to them – we just rely on them to do a good job. Some of Dave’s (DSJR) anecdotes from his friend who worked for Decca (?) are revealing, suggesting that the final ‘sound’ is subject to fashion and not at all absolute.

So for those who do not, or choose not to, attend live un-amplified concerts, there is no reference, although they may however play an instrument themselves or have friends or family that do. Without this reference no doubt they would put together a system that sounds ‘right’ or ‘good’ to them.

In this case the term high fidelity means having a high degree of faithfulness to the ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ of the music, without necessarily being the last word in realism, since the conveyance of emotion is just as important as tonal accuracy, dynamics, frequency response and all the other things we worry about.
Hear, hear! I couldn't agree more, Barry - especially with the bits I've highlighted

Live un-amplified music is where it's at in terms of the true benchmark for any hi-fi system. Stan is also 100% correct with what he has written, by looking at the subject from another very valid angle.

Marco.