Musicians in your living room vs. you in the recording hall?

Both. Since my listening room is as small as a small venue I can enjoy both.

A listening room that is too small (like a bedroom) tends to leave too much of its own sonic signature. Same with a very large room like a gymnasium. In between is ideal - around 5000 cubic feet being optimal. There should be plenty of space behind the listener.

“What’s the difference?”

The difference is that a setup where the room has a significant effect on the sound will always have some room influence - and this will always have some impact.

A good setup will present the recording space as presented on the recording. In many live recordings this will be the venue or for studio or close miked recordings it will tend to sound as if they are in your room or in front of you.

Phase accuracy, listener and speaker placement is important. In smaller spaces the best place to sit is near field in order to minimize the room.

Directionality is a really complex thing. Definitely useful. I can walk around in the total dark and sense walls (not very accurately but I can manage at a snails pace) - small obstacles are beyond my hearing acuity.

Below 2000 Hz we use the time arrivals of the sound at each ear to work out left right position. Above 2000 Hz we use the relative loudness of the sound (as the head blocks out frequencies above 6000 Hz very effectively (even for small angles off axis like 30 degrees). For the above reasons I believe phase is very important. If high frequencies are delayed by your typical Minimum phase filter or MQA then imaging won’t be as precise because location cues arrive later than they should.

Front, back and up down directionality is more complex. We use the floor reflections which cause comb filtering to work out height. We also use the phase distortion caused by our pinea to work out front and back and to a less extent up down.

Anyway, like a dog, we will obviously tilt our head or move side to side to better deploy our location capabilities especially as high frequencies are so heavily attenuated or blocked by our head.

I would say we can detect the direction of a sound to within two or three inches from 20 feet away given enough sonic info (won’t work for a 100 Hz tone where directionality is challenged)