Anyway, the reason for my post is simply to encourage audiophile to get out and listen to the real thing.
Great advice.
I remember years ago hearing a live piano recital and then it's playback on a SD card of all things.
The playback was very close to the original but what really bothered me was that neither of them sounded the way I wanted them to.
I later realised that when you've been listening to audio systems for years and years you become familiar by and large with how most of them sound.
You also become used used to the effect of the compression used in most recordings, most broadcasts, most television and most cinema soundtracks.
As a consequence it's easy to forget what real music and real voices sound like.
It's often not like what you were expecting. So, unless you keep yourself acquainted with live music you could easily end up with a skewed reference when judging playback systems.
What troubles me is this profligate use of compression everywhere. It seems to be readily accepted that we don't want our music or speech reproduced realistically.
All those people we see on TV and often hear on the radio rarely if ever sound like that in real life.
Yet no one ever seems to mind.