Why I like my home system better than live music

I'm around a lot of live music, including right in my home or listening room. Anyone that says you can't reproduce live sound, to the point you can't tell the difference, on an audio system, is making too broad of a generalization. I've never heard a symphony orchestra reproduced convincingly, but it is absolutely practical to convincingly reproduce a piano, a flute, a violin, or even a full drum kit. In the case of a flute, I've had the musician playing along with herself on a studio-recorded CD while she was standing between my speakers. It wasn't a quite a perfect match, mostly because the recording wasn't all that great (I suspect the mic), but it was very, very close.

A drum kit takes one hell of an audio system to reproduce correctly. Especially cymbals. Most tweeters suck in power handling. I've only heard two speakers *ever* that got cymbals just right, and I bought one of them. But it is possible to do a very convincing reproduction of my wife's DW drum kit.

The problem is that I usually don't want a real, actual drum kit reproduced in my listening room. It's too loud. When my wife gets all worked up passionately playing I don't even want to stand nearby. I want to be about 20 feet away. It needs to be a very large room to sound pleasant. A flute in my listening room, yes. Maybe a sax (a sax can be very loud), certainly a piano (we have one), also a cello. A rock band? No.

Amplified live music is usually terrible. You're usually listening to a PA system no one here would have in their listening room. Even the local jazz scene has become terrible. They mic everything, and pump them up with hundreds of watts of PA. Yuck. There is exactly one place we've found where we can listen to unamplified acoustic jazz. (It's awesome).

I don't expect my home audio system to sound like a live performance, because I seldom play it that loud. Live and realistic are two different concepts, I think. I expect a drum kit to sound absolutely realistic, but I don't often want to sound live.

The two speakers that got cymbals right were Revel Ultima2 (Salon or Studio, it makes no difference for this test) and B&W 80xD (I've listened to the 800D & the 802D; they were equal in this regard). I bought the Revels.

A stick hitting a cymbal is a sound that can be easily recognized as right or wrong, because it's a purely mechanical sound, I think, but the sound produced is actually so complex. And it must often be loud. Done just right your reaction is: OMG, that sounds real. Some speakers I've heard that can't get a cymbal just right:

Wilson Sasha & the Maxx2.
Sound Labs. (This was the test that caused me not to buy a pair.)
Thiel 3.7
Avantgarde whatevers.
KEF 207/2
Legacys (including the latest Whispers.)
Linkwitz Orion. (Though these are truly excellent in many other ways. Actually, cymbals are one of the few sounds that ruin the "live" illusion with these speakers.)
I can't think of others off the top of my head.

I'm not saying cymbals are the ultimate speaker test, but they appear to be a test for accuracy that easily produces a "right" and "wrong", in a way other difficult to reproduce sounds don't seem to.

Mapman, I was always listening to high quality solid state electronics, and I'm not one to believe that there's a significant difference between electronics at that quality level. I know that might be heresy here, but I'm pretty sure the differences I was hearing were in the speakers. Also, I never heard cymbals sound real with my old Legacy Focus, but with the same electronics (and cables) otherwise I heard the shock and awe effect on the same recordings with the Revels.

You know, now that you mention it, I think the Sound Labs were driven by Audio Research tube amps. My last opportunity to listen to SLs was a slightly used pair of A1 px (the audiophile version) in the owner's home. So you may have got me on that solid state statement, though I have heard SLs driven by solid state amps. I was so fascinated by the speakers I can honestly say I don't remember much about the rest of the system (but it was very high end). I was also listening to CDs only, in case anyone else wants to argue the analog case. ;)

Ya know, if there was ever a speaker a person could fall in love with, it's the Sound Lab A1s. When they're good (like on full orchestra, chamber music, acoustic jazz, etc) they are incredible. I ended up not buying them because I do like rock and roll and contemporary jazz a lot, and for these types of music I find the SLs a little frustrating. I also suspect that part of the SLs magic is a coloration, and part of it is the dipole nature of the beast, and you also need a near-perfect room to situate them properly.

All I can say is try the test yourself and see if you think I'm full of bs or not. A lot of high end speakers convey a lot of information, so that you can hear minute differences and nuance, but they fail various realism tests. (My Legacys were like that.) I just find it interesting that in my personal experience I stumbled upon a little test that so few speakers pass. And the two that do are very controversial, to say the least. Lots of people on Audiogon don't think the B&Ws or the Revels are best they've heard.

Rleff, as I mentioned in my posts, I think there's a lot to love in Sound Lab speakers. They are remarkable. But when your wife is a drummer you get a tendency to judge speakers by how realistic they make drum kits sound. I've also been fascinated over the years by how rare the "shock and awe" feeling of realism is in audio. I'm honestly not trying to even imply that the Revels (or the B&Ws for that matter) are really better than the SLs, they were just better *for me* at the time I made the decision.

"The simplest way for me to put it is that there's a presence to live instruments that is lacking in recorded music. "

I don't agree with this statement as a rule, but I think there are four reasons why this is often true in most peoples' listening rooms:

1. Venue. Most people do not listen to recorded music in rooms as large as live music is played in. You can't have live-sounding "big sound" in a small room.

2. Volume level. Live music is often too loud for a listening room, and we all know (or should know) that volume level is an incredibly important factor in how anything sounds.

3. Putting the usual chest-beating stuff aside that is normally posted on Audiogon, the vast majority of audio systems are not capable of reproducing live sound levels, so they can't sound live. Reproducing a solo grand piano, for example, is unlikely to sound realistic if you have a pair of 10" woofers that have to reach well into the midrange.

4. Most speakers aren't very good. They have colored frequency responses, or they have non-optimal dispersion characteristics or other anomalies that color the sound.

On the other hand, if you have a large room and large, accurate, low-distortion speakers with a lot of amplifier power behind them, on a few really outstanding recordings you can get surprisingly close to live sound. In my experience, with some solo instruments, to the point that you can't tell the difference. Of course, the difficulty of maintaining that illusion increases in proportion to ensemble size, so even chamber music is out of reach for most of us. But a solo guitar? Been there, done that, you can get eerily close.

I'm lost. Weseixas, who are you responding to?