Sat front row at the symphony...

+1 @frogman 

  especially the comments about highlighting the soloist in recordings, and the excellent comment about the doubling of instruments to form a unison line.

I've been enjoying all of this discourse about concert hall seating. No so much different from user preferences in home audio I think. Some folks want infinite  detail (they call it transparency I think) and folks who go to concerts like the big blend not so much an audiophiles 'transparency'. At home I'm hearing music I know pretty well and often I listen to it in a subdued fashion as I read or otherwise occupy myself. When I go to a concert I want to be involved! I want dynamics. I want the impact I can get in isle 8 dead center (for example). If I want to learn the music I do it at home, but in a live concert I don't want to even think about anything that might be important to an audiophile. But that's just me. :-)

I find that Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh has some strange reflections. I prefer Synod Hall in Oakland. I decided to do a comparison once. I got a balcony seat at Synod Hall in the middle and leaned out and listened very carefully. Then I went home and put on a Telarc vinyl LP of similar music and listened carefully. The sound was the same ! I closed my eyes and I was back at Synod Hall. I opened my eyes and found speakers instead of musicians. I own full range electrostatic speakers. The bass is incredible with power and authority. You would swear I have subwoofers but I don't.

You may like the sound in the balcony and from your speakers, but this is a bit of an apples/oranges comparison.  Depending on the music, Telarc recordings employ a mix of close mikes and distant hall mikes to capture hall ambience.  Some recordings use several spaced omni mikes at the front of the stage.  The omnis reveal more hall ambience and less specificity of instrument placement than cardioid mikes.  The net perspective of the Telarc is about row 10, which is much closer than balcony perspective.  This correlates with my experience auditioning large stat panels such as Martin Logan, SoundLab.  Bass is powerful from the large panel area, but the large panel area radiates sound in a multitude of directions which causes high freq time smear and rolloff due to different time arrivals from all points on the panel.  

Even a balcony lover like mahler123 found that a recent concert of a Shostakovich violin concerto showed less detail in the balcony than his experience at home with an old recording of Oistrakh with Mitropoulos conducting the NYP.  If you want to judge the overall accuracy of your audio system, experiment with rows 5-15 and compare to the Telarc recording, or sit much closer near the stage for Mercury Living Presence recordings, or my favorite 1967 Turnabout LP of Rachmaninoff Symphonic Dances with Donald Johanos conducting the Dallas Symphony.  A great companion Turnabout LP from 1967 is Copland, Fanfare for the Common Man, and Rodeo.  Very dynamic in your face Fanfare with brass and percussion, which I like better than a much more laid back audiophile recording of Fanfare on either Telarc or Reference Recordings (I forgot which).  Some pieces are appropriate for laid back recordings, like subtle Debussy, but Fanfare deserves more immediacy.

For accuracy, the original Quad 57 electrostatic is tops, although it is deficient in bass and loud dynamics. 

One of the reasons I attend concerts is because no matter how good my system gets, it will never approximate the sensations of a full orchestra in a large hall.  I especially enjoy hearing familiar works, not because I am adverse to unfamiliar music, but because I usually hear many details on the familiar works in the auditorium .  I just don’t need to be sitting in the conductor’s lap to hear and appreciate these details.  I recently heard a Mozart Piano Concerto where fingernail scrapings on the keys were clearly audible, and I could appreciate the soloist slowing down in some louder passages because of the hall resonance.  In my balcony seat there were very audible reflections from the sidewalls and the musicians were taking slight pauses to allow some of that to dissipate in order not to muddy the sound.  Now @viber6 would retort that a violin can’t be appreciated at that perspective in the same fashion as a modern piano can, and he has a point, so in an ideal situation perhaps sitting closer for VCs is advisable.  That is difficult because when one purchases a concert series you get the same seats all the time, but for one offs it is more feasible..

  Except….there are certain VCs where the Orchestra has at least as important a role.  For me the Sibelius VC isn’t just a vehicle for a hot shot soloist, it is basically a Symphony with a high level Violin Obligatto. I would prefer my regular balcony seat for those Sibelian brass explosions whereas @viber6 would want to be front row to fully appreciate the soloist.  And if you change your perspective every time depending on the work, then as a listener, what is your baseline?  It is a musical equivalent of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, in that by calibrating where our fannies sit to hear the music, we have distorted our critical facilities for true perception.  No, I ‘ll stick to the balcony perspective whenever possible