Does Your System Sound Like the Real Thing?

I agree with Jond. I am often amazed at how close my system is when I play music back at close to the recording volume (or what I think it is.) That is usually a lot louder than most people listen.

Also, how many times has some sound come across and fooled you that it is not the system but in the next room, etc.?

Of course it sounds LIKE the real thing! Do you think I would have spent all that time and money just to get some poor replica of the real thing? Now if I could just take it the last hundred miles and have it BE the real thing. :-)

This is the ultimate question and the answer for me has
always been "of course not". But, it's not what I expect.
Just like sex, music is more in the mind than the body.
If that weren't true, any music reproduction
system would be worthless.

I would like to set up an experiment where musicians
play live from behind a curtain, then live from a remote
location with the sound reproduced using the best mics,
amps, cables, and speakers behind the curtain.
I bet ANYONE could tell the difference.

In my experience, the part of music reproduction that
causes the most "damage" is the recording itself.
This was made clear to me many years ago,
and often since, while listening to radio.
WFMT (a fine Chicago radio station!) was playing
recorded music, as usual, but then switched to a live,
non-recorded performance from their studios. The
change in the quality of music reproduction was immediately
apparent. I've listened carefully to the difference
between live, non-recorded music and recorded music in
any medium (tape, LP, direct-to-disc, CD, HDCD, SACD)
and non-recorded music certainly comes closest to real.

TJ

The real thing? With eyes closed, I can tell in a jiff between the real thing, and my humble $25K system. I can also, in a jiff with eyes closed, tell the real thing from live with a $250k system. We've come a long way in stereo, but live is not even close---To these tympanics, at any rate....I'm talking acoustic instruments, properly miked vocals too. Electric instruments, synthesizers and the like? That's very close!

on smaller scale recordings (allison krauss, vivaldi chamber
stuff, piano, mozart clarinet quintet, etc.) my system sounds
great and extremely satisfying. on beethoven #5 or stravinsky's firebird, it sounds like a stereo. large choral works sound largely strident. i heard the wilson wamms Wonce
and they came startlingly close to sounding like a symphony orchestra (shostakovich #4/ashekenazy). if you have gobs of
money to build a room and customize a system, you might be able to acheive "95%" of reality. otherwise, imho, stick
to good recordings of chamber music and/or attend more concerts.