Detailed sound? Real?

Most rock music gets mixed, equalized and compressed in the studio. This doesn't happen on stage

False. Every pop/rock commercial venue I've ever been to had some sort of mixer/PA system for music. In the pop/rock world live, unamplified sound is virtually non-existent. Amplified concert performances should not be used as a reference for how real music sounds.

There are times when a recording engineer is actually trying to accurately capture exactly what a musician playing a real instrument in a real acoustic space sounds like. But this situation is really not that common (at least in commercial music production). Recording is more akin to making a commercial Hollywood style movie than a documentary film. In movies to make something look or sound real is the result of dozens of crafts people doing everything but what actually appears on the screen. It sounds silly, but things have to be more real than reality or else it doesn't appear real on the screen. Filming a scene that is supposed to take place in the rain is a perfect example. Real rainfall doesn't film well -- you need fake rain. It's a very similar situation with recording music. If you just placed two microphones midway back in a concert hall and recorded the output, it probably won't sound very good, nor will it sound real.

Just like anything you can push this fake reality too far. The trend in audiophile sound reproduction over the past two decades has been toward an overly detailed sound. It's as if we want a nearfield listening experience sitting 10 feet from the speaker.

Amplified music requires one transducer to convert soundwaves into electrical current, another transducer to convert the electrical current back into soundwaves and an intervening system of electrical device(s) to relay the electrical signal between the two transducers. At our current level of technology, microphones do not pick up soundwaves the way the human ear/brain system does and loudspeakers don't radiate soundwaves the way instruments produce them. From this I conclude that amplified sound is fundamentally differ than unamplified sound. My point holds even if the original instrument is an electric instrument used with an amplifier.

Several people have mentioned that unless you were at the recording venue during the performance that you really can't say what the recording should sound like. I would take it farther and say you would have to have been at the mastering session where the engineer, artist and producer finalized the recording's sound to have an accurate reference for how your home system should sound. Clearly this raises the additional issue of whether the recording is accurate to the sound of the original performance.

The main flaw with the pursuit of the absolute sound as detailed in the magazine of the same name is how they minimize the effect of the recording process. No matter what you do on the home reproduction side, you can never compensate for the inherently destructive nature of the recording process. Which is not to say that you can't have high quality, good fidelity, pleasant sounding home audio reproduction.