Bear is of course talking about dynamic range in his first paragraph, and how if you were to use an expander on a lot of the compressed and limited material available, you would wind up with quieter "quiets" for a majority of the playing time. But his comments also happen to point up the fact of what a grotesque parody of "natural" sound most electronically reinforced "live" concerts present today, something John Atkinson commented on in a recent column.
But if you're familiar with (and listen to recordings of) naturally produced acoustic music, perceivability of the really quiet events is definitely a good thing if one is trying to achieve "live"-sounding results. For this you also need low noise (high S/N ratio). This applies not only to the system, but to the listening environment as well. Low-level detail can be easily masked by ambient noise.
Bear's point about system headroom and room size also bring up another aspect, which can be called "absolute volume fidelity". Too often in our systems, it is just easier to ignore this, but for naturally recorded music, you really must be able to reproduce it at the same volume at which it was originally played. The illusion of "live" cannot genuinely be approached otherwise, and this only makes sense. But for something like a piano or a horn, this requires a lot more power than most folks realize not to compress or distort the instantaneous peaks, and your room must be of a certain size, and preferably acoustically treated as well, if it is also not to overload on these and give away the game.
Finally, I would like to point out that while seemingly not high on the priority list of most audiophiles, and not yet attainable for most program material anyway, recreating a believable, immersive soundfield through some sort of multi-channel record/playback scheme will do as much or more to address the "live-like" question as any of the preceding can. Sorry to repeatedly wander so far off-topic on the thread-head's question about how to accomplish "live" given a modest system in a small room without scrapping it all, but I don't know how to do that, so I ramble instead. }:-(
But if you're familiar with (and listen to recordings of) naturally produced acoustic music, perceivability of the really quiet events is definitely a good thing if one is trying to achieve "live"-sounding results. For this you also need low noise (high S/N ratio). This applies not only to the system, but to the listening environment as well. Low-level detail can be easily masked by ambient noise.
Bear's point about system headroom and room size also bring up another aspect, which can be called "absolute volume fidelity". Too often in our systems, it is just easier to ignore this, but for naturally recorded music, you really must be able to reproduce it at the same volume at which it was originally played. The illusion of "live" cannot genuinely be approached otherwise, and this only makes sense. But for something like a piano or a horn, this requires a lot more power than most folks realize not to compress or distort the instantaneous peaks, and your room must be of a certain size, and preferably acoustically treated as well, if it is also not to overload on these and give away the game.
Finally, I would like to point out that while seemingly not high on the priority list of most audiophiles, and not yet attainable for most program material anyway, recreating a believable, immersive soundfield through some sort of multi-channel record/playback scheme will do as much or more to address the "live-like" question as any of the preceding can. Sorry to repeatedly wander so far off-topic on the thread-head's question about how to accomplish "live" given a modest system in a small room without scrapping it all, but I don't know how to do that, so I ramble instead. }:-(