Thoughts on the most difficult instruments for speakers to reproduce?

@mlsstl ,

'Given all of this, I am not surprised that I find most recordings mediocre and some downright bad. It is almost a miracle that a few recordings out there are extraordinary. There really is an art to the process that not every recording engineer and producer possesses.'


Sadly true.
But not surprising in what is after all a profit driven industry. 

If we're talking about recording a human voice then I'm betting that even a smartphone could do an adequate recording of it for our comparison purposes.

I've played back home movies made on a Sony digital camera and the sound was wonderfully uncompressed - in the way you might expect live sound to be but usually isn't - not even on live albums!

As for the voices of family and friends, they were uncannily real in a way that TV or Radio ones with the usual added bass rarely are. 

Compare the frequency (both high/low) and dynamic (SPL) ranges of piano (or- any other instrument) and pipe organ, here: https://www.zytrax.com/tech/audio/audio.html#frequencies      Not a matter of opinion (all other considerations being equal)!

@isochronism Still worked for me!

I was listening to a nice, well regarded pair of speakers and getting ready to pull the trigger when on a whim I asked to hear an older 70's rock recording and that's when the speakers tweeter showed its true nature and the salesman couldn't stop the playback fast enough. Resale on new speakers is horrible so when buying new play everything you can and listen to how the system handles less than stellar recordings, listen for compression and how the speakers handle everything. The harder  it is to hear the compromise, the longer they'll last in your home.

Steve...glad you were able to avoid an expensive mistake. Tweeter attributes are critical in speaker selection. Don’t laugh but I would always bring the ultimate tweeter killer speaker shopping with me, BST Spinning Wheel. The opening horns exposed serious flaws in many expensive speaker tweeters . Ultimately I went with  soft domes which is a trade off but worth it to me....not that those BST horns will ever sound good on any speaker :)