Does anyone know where this J. Gordon Holt comes from?

@clearthinker … “Hey, which of us DOESN’T want our rig to SOUND LIKE THE REAL THING???”

Honestly? I think many (most?) try to make it sound better to them…. More detail, more slam… microdetails. That is what I did for the first twenty or twenty five years of my pursuit of the high end… I wanted it to sound better to me. Which was Gordon’s point.

I found when I did that I would make a change that would make one kind of music sound better, then others would not sound as good. I realized I was chasing my tail. 

I needed a ruled with which to judge. I quickly realized that had to be live acoustic music. Only after careful listening and tuning in to what live acoustic music sounded like did my system truly start sounding great… for all forms of music. Over a decade going to the symphony and small jazz concerts… or sitting next to a piano calibrated my ear. My system went from an interesting thing I liked to listen to for a half hour to a completely involving system I have to drag myself away after hours of listening.

I think Gordon was right on point with the pursuit’s goal should be recreating the real musical experience. After all, the musicians have worked endlessly to make tell music as appealing as humanly possible.

@ghdprentice      That's perceptive and I agree with you.  Whilst misguided producers mess when they record acoustic sound in a space, most try to recapture the original event.  Multiple miking of orchestral symphonies just creates an artificial mess.  Did you hear the Zimerman/Rattle Beethoven concertos recorded on DG during the COVID?  I have the LPs.  Pretty well every instrument was individually miked and the signals taken back to a presumably enormous mixing desk where one imagines the producer flexing the sliders in an effort to outthink Beethoven.  In doing so the 'original event' was expunged.  By contrast, those who record orchestras with a simple stereo pair can produce a good reproduction of the live performance.

By the same process almost all music involving electrically amplified instruments is artificially mixed so that even those who were in the studio cannot relate the recorded event to the original event.  There can be no worthwhile objective of trying to reproduce the 'original' sound.  This cannot be done and indeed the original sound cannot be identified.

But I think we are agreed that accurate reproduction of a correctly recorded acoustic event is a worthwhile objective.  More artificial 'events' and recordings just have to follow along.  I can still enjoy such recordings but there is no 'real thing' with which to compare them, so I don't.

+1 @ghdprentice. The listener needs a sonic standard of reference, however this might be described in words. I share the "recreate the live event" standard. Just finding this much easier to achieve via LP than streaming (the quest continues).

If we visited the listening rooms of all the people on Audiogon who say that their systems sound like real instruments in real spaces, I'm pretty sure each system would sound different from the others. 

Then there is the problem of what does real sound like.  The venue you listen in and your seating location while real instruments play greatly affects how that instrument sounds.  We all hear differently too, very differently.

Then there is the fact that we are listening to a recording.  On the first Stereophile test CD (yellow booklet) there is a track where none other than J Gordon Holt reads an editorial from a very early Sterophile entitled, "Why Hi-Fi Experts Disagree."  He is recorded through 19 different microphones and it is not that hard to tell when a microphone change occurs.

So, it seems to me that real instruments in real space is not a hard objective reality.  Of course, most of us want our systems to sound as real as possible and I'm striving for that too. I try to get vocals to sound natural.  I'm closer than I used to be, but I don't think I'll ever get to the point where a large percentage of my recordings fool me into thinking that there is a real vocalist standing between my speakers singing just for me.  YMMV

One’s perspective of what constitutes “real live sound” can be different depending on one’s circumstance - and all can be true.

For symphony orchestra listeners, it isn’t just what seat in the house you like to sit in. We who play in orchestras are right in the midst of the action, and acclimated to that sound. I play hundreds of professional orchestra concerts a year, and am lucky to get to go to one. It is probably why 60s Columbia recordings with all their myriad close mics picking up the bows’ rosin, the clarinets breath escaping the reed, and the horn’s spit splaying out the mouthpiece, sound very much ‘correct’ to me. That is my milieu and my baseline for judging orchestral recordings (I miss John McClure’s aesthetic for producing orchestral recordings).

I suppose I also belong in the camp that ANY recording is a synthetic creative product, and never an actual exact representation of the live event (like Glenn Gould), as opposed to the “2 or 3 mics in the prime spot of the hall” crowd (although many of those recordings sound fantastic!). So why bother fighting this reality?

In other words, the whole “high fidelity” concept is a product of it’s original time, back in the 50s when it was very difficult to acquire equipment that was not fraught with technical problems. We might just live in “post hi-fidelity” times.