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The best reference is live music

For those of you who love classical music and care about imaging in your audio system, I recommend that you check out a San Francisco area group called Voices of Music.

They video record all of their performances and have most all of it on YouTube and free to access.  They are extremely well engineered recordings and more than worthy for the very finest audio systems.  What makes these recordings especially *useful*, as well as enjoyable, is that being video, you can see where all of the musicians are.  The best reference in audio is live performance.  Does  your system do an honest job of recreating the live performance?  Does your system give an image that at all matches what you see on the video?

Beyond this issue, Voices of Music is worthy to experience because they are very different from the large symphonic performances that most classical listeners hear.  Instead of the SF Symphony with 100 musicians, Voices of Music will typically have about 8 to 12 players.  There are some larger ensembles and some smaller.

They are an "early music" ensemble.  Just as rock 'n roll evolved from the early 1950's to what we have today, what we call classical music evolved as well.  The instruments evolved too.  A 19th century violin (what the musicians call "modern") has a neck pulled back, has steel strings and is engineered to be louder than an 18th or 17th century violin, which has a straighter neck and gut strings.  They are in fact, different instruments.

An 18th century instrument will articulate better.  The bow is lighter and faster than a 19th century bow.  Trumpets of that period had no valves.  Neither did French horns.  Flutes were typically wooden and had open holes.  That period also had instruments completely absent from "modern" orchestras.  If you haven't listened to a 1st rate early music ensemble, you're in for a totally new experience.

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russbutton OP
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After reading the comments here, it seems to me that the ideal differs among audiophiles. @ronboco stated: "I just want the songs I loved growing up to sound great on my system. Studio recordings almost always sound better than live music ."   This is a valid objective.  What he wants is to enjoy the studio recordings he grew up listening to.  Accuracy is not the measure, but rather his personal enjoyment.  Why should he sacrifice his enjoyment for someone elseʻs standard of performance?

There are those who feel that the ideal is to repeoduce as much as possible, what the studio engineer intended.  That would require the home system to reproduce what they had in the studio.  If it were before about 1990, Iʻd say that your  home system should be Altec 604 drivers in a sealed enclosure, mounted on your wall.  Studios today all use various nearfield monitors.  I feel this ideal is unrealistic because not all engineers mix to the same standards.

The original ideal of stereo reproduction back in the late 1950s was exemplified by Mercury Records and their space omni recordings, which are still held in very high regard today, tape hiss and all.  Iʻm an old Big Band trumpet player and my wife is a mostly retired professional classical violinist.  Iʻm a good musician and sheʻs the serious musician in the family.  The things I look for are a correct tonal balance first and imaging second.  Does that acoustic piano recording sound like a live piano in my home?

I run a custom set of open baffle Linkwitz Orion loudspeakers that really nail it for me.  Voices and ascoustic instruments are delivered with a clarity that to my ear, Iʻve never enjoyed more anywhere.  Other systems do image better, though the Orions do very well.  I very much admire what Iʻve heard from the Dutch & Dutch 8c.

I feel that the Voices of Music videos are helpful in comparing the imaging I hear with where the actual performers were located relative to the microphone array in the middle.  Itʻs a standard that speaks to my own ideals, and feel it would be useful for others who have a similar opinion.
 

 

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