You are there vs. They are there

@retiredaudioguy 

In some review I remember reading "a good system will being the performers to your room, a great system will take you there."

 

For the most part, there would be a recording booth. I doubt you want to be there. It’s almost like saying the taste of a good dish will take you to the kitchen. Most of the albums in our libraries are recorded in a studio not live. 

@mylogic 

If anything spatially changes a recording in any way…. the reproduction is flawed.

How would you know the recording is changed unless you were at the recording studio or the live venue. Also, there is a difference between adding things and restoring things that were actually lost. 

@audiodwebe 

Try The Temptation album All Directions, especially Papa Was a Rolling Stone track. Also Miles Davis album Someday My Prince Will Come, especially the track Teo. Wynton Marsalis album, The Magic Hour, track Big Fat Hen. I am sure others will point you to many more. 

@mylogic 

I believe we are in agreement. I feel like we are a little too hang up on the fidelity part of Hi-Fi. It’s like trying to pick a faithful painting portrait of Abe Lincoln but we have never seen him in real life. It will be hard to know which one resembles him the most. Obviously, some of them would be rejected off hand: like Abe with dog ears or with a chicken beak or Abe with a tail. But there would be a fair number of portraits that would be plausible. Which one is true to the original would be hard to determine. At the end of the day, we will have to pick the one that pleases us the most. Because we are dealing with music reproduction and music as an art, we have to allow ourselves some freedom to choose based on preference to our ears even though we might stray from the supposed original. We also have to keep in mind, that our rooms have a lot to say about the presentation. Take care.