The Vain Pursuit of Excellence - Discussion.

[StanleyB]

So do we strive to set up systems we like the sound of, or do we strive for realism? How do we know what is real in studio produced recordings? The only comparison is with live unamplified acoustic instruments or the human voice. Those that never attend concerts will never know, so they may as well build a system whose sound they like and spend time box swapping in pursuit of this goal.

I would have to disagree with you big time.

What you hear at a concert often bears no resemblance to what you hear in a recording studio. Very few times do the artists hurdle together as they do on stage, are the mics in the same position as on stage, and is the nearest wall as far away as on stage.
On top of that, the recordings in a studio are of a different nature than that experienced by one's ears from a stage performance. The recording engineer in the studio has to battle with signal overload on one end of his VU meter scale, and too low an output for some sounds to be heard at the other end. So he keeps having to adjust the signal levels from the various audio inputs as the music keeps rolling. That doesn't happen on stage.

Trying to recreate a stage performance in one's audio set up from a studio recording performance has nothing to do with Nirvana of the first( and I am not even addressing the complete miss-selling of the written word versus the contextual meaning). They are completely different products, and should be treated as such.

The nearest analogy I can think of is eating home made food, supermarket pre-cooked food, or food from the nearest take away. The ingredients might be the same, but the preparation methods are all different. So the end results look and taste different.
The same goes for life versus recorded music, and no amount of table dressing and dress codes is going to make them sound and taste the same.

Stan