How much reality do you really need?

Only issue I have with the question is the lack of clarity around the word reality. After all, if my room goes from being a silent chamber to being filled with sound, that’s about as real as could be hoped for. Real in the most basic sense of "something" rather than "nothing."

So...reality is.... simulation? Or miniature? Or cameo? Or animation? Or claymation? And once we get the genre of representation settled, we still need the translation formula. Stieglitz did one kind of translation and Monet did another. Which translation is "real"? They all are. Which are best? The million dollar question.

Here are some philosophical options on the "real" and some possible ways they would play out in audio. 
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaphysics/#BeiSucFirCauUncThi

• “Being is; not-being is not” [Parmenides];
• That which fills silence is "real."
• “Essence precedes existence” [Avicenna, paraphrased];
• What is real is in the source. Everything else takes away from it. Do no harm, is the audiophile prescription.
• “Existence in reality is greater than existence in the understanding alone” [St Anselm, paraphrased];
• Subjectively enjoying perfect sound is not as good as subjectively enjoying sound that really is perfect.
• “Being is the most barren and abstract of all categories” [Hegel, paraphrased];
• Anything can be; to be something particular (even beautiful) is the proper aspiration.
• “To be is to be the value of a bound variable” [Quine].
• Nothing exists outside of some bounded (limited, particularized) instantiation of it. There is no general real, only plural reals.

Real needs to be defined or the discussion is pointless. 

With enough distance from the movie (or audio) one can suspend belief and truly get immersed. But once you start to try to get too close, it becomes an issue that you're not really immersed. Ironically, distance leads to more immersion than simulation does. See: "And lastly, the question of immersion. 3D films remind the audience that they are in a certain "perspective" relationship to the image. It is almost a Brechtian trick. Whereas if the film story has really gripped an audience they are "in" the picture in a kind of dreamlike "spaceless" space. So a good story will give you more dimensionality than you can ever cope with." https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/why-3d-doesnt-work-and-never-will-case-closed

@realworldaudio 

I find that _most_ current ultra-high end gear focuses too much on the enhanced resolution aspect, creating an illusionary sonic envelope that feels very much real, but also quite a bit different from the original source. It traps you in the superficiality, and shuts down the imagination, which is the exact opposite of what a live performance does.
So, by getting even higher resolution we might be getting further away from the music itself.... yet, much closer to an imaginary perfected sensory experience. A great and fun endeavor, but ultimately a form of escapism: adoring the shape of sound while shunning the message of the music.

+1000 on this. Brilliant post and I couldn't agree more. So astute and eloquent. Thank you!

@terry9 

Hiide, that's a good point about definition, but I don't agree. Sometimes a good definition only arises in the context of a discussion or a legacy of agreement.

I actually agree with you. I was not meaning to insist on a definition first, but on one which might help in the context of this discussion. Just thought the word "reality" was too unconstrained and we needed some structure. Even sandlot baseball (or pickup basketball, etc.) needs rules to get going.

@rettrussell Loved that passage. Thanks for sharing it. Have you read Boorstin's short little gem, "Making experience repeatable"? It's about what happened to our appreciation of music when it was no longer a live event, connected to a time, place, social occasion.

@fuzztone  Your disdain for the topic needs to be announced, why?

@mijostyn   Your post presupposes that reality exists autonomously, independent of everyone's apprehension of it. I'll leave that one to @hilde45 to resolve.

Since the listener is part of an interactive system with the music-recording-reproduction circuit, it's all real. 

As for independent reality existing, how would we know? ;-)