Ultimately reproducing what is on the recording is the best you can do. Electronics have no intentions, the recording artists do, so even with perfect electronic technology the artist may decide to go retro with their sound and so should your system.
Like giving a painting proper lighting and place on the wall each CD/LP is a work of art and whether its good art or bad art the system at best should expose the true characteristics of the peice and give the listener enough information to discriminate the strengths and weaknesses of the many facets by which we judge art.
Modern Audiophiles engage in selective distortion in a sense they play Godhead or Creator, as they bend the work of others to satisfy themselves ( I am guilty) and this is the primary function of their system. This is why there is so much diversity in equipment as we do not build systems to accomodate intentions of the artist we instead build systems to suit our own aesthetic sensibilities, thus many of us are committing one of the mortal sins in our pursuit. On hobby level of course, no one is going to hell for this. :) But audiophiles put themselves first before the artist, and this is why a question like this can be raised with sincerity.
Creating "Live" feel is a distortion that some strive to attain....and at times do, but at a cost that another may not wish to pay. Distortion feeds into subjectivity, making subjectivity more important than objectivity. This of course is disasterous as in many areas equipment has improved little because the goal of what an "improvement" is remains unclear.
It is why high end is slowly dying, unlike Home Theater who's protaganists put the art first. Today, even the weakest lo-tech "High End Audio" company can survive on a good review and the attitude that whatever you like is right. When we all should have the fortitude to recognize that we may like the "wrong" thing and accept it. Smoking is unhealthy and if the goal is to be healthy then smoking is wrong. In a hobby which claims to deal in refinement and high performance, the reality is chaos and poor performance in the meaty part of the bell curve.
It is why outsiders don't "get it" and why sometimes our highly personalized systems give a negative impression to the un-enlightened and the enlightened alike.
At the time of my post there are four posts and all of them contain part of the chaos created by the lack of common ground on the matter. Let me finish make note of their thoughs so to highlite the incredible lack of consensus on such an easy topic.
"I benchmark electronics against original performances because I have heard unamplified live music and I "know" what it should sound like" (missing key detail) when recorder through X microphone and X processors, mastered on X speakers.... Over-simplification but the way it should be done.
"We are so stuck on the equipment that we believe it is the electronic engineer that "gets it".
The subtle rhetoric of exclusion and elitism
"High End is to produce the most intriguing experience with reproduced music."
The artist excluded, almost juxtaposed to the post above
There is no "getting it" to be gotten. It's all relative.
As permissive as it gets, no standards are good standards.
There will be more like this but why are these attitudes so prevalent and almost negative, when the answer to the original question is simply no.
Best Regards to you all.
