Which is better, live performance or on your system?

Reproduced music will never sound like life music. Reproduced music simply cannot produce the SCALE of life music.

I recently (back in February) saw Eighth Blackbird, a group of five talentend young proponents of contemporary concert music, play in a hall that was simply too large for a chamber group. The concert was very exciting, and the group was both musically and visually stimulating. However, since were a small group playing in a large hall, they had to be miked. The amplification of the group reduced the aural aspect of the concert to the level of a concert via a poor PA system. Sonically, my two-channel system could beat any such event hands-down. The eighty-year-old couple snoring away behind me didn't help, either.

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I think it depends on the type of music. I jump at the chance to go to Lincoln Center to hear the NY philharmonic
but I am also a big jazz fan and the last venue I attended at the Beacon Theatre left me wondering if I would get hearing damage it was so loud. My claim is this: for classical I jump at the chance to catch a concert but for jazz my ears are more comfortable at home.

It blows my mind that someone would actually compare their stereo to a live classical performance and use their audio system as the benchmark. In my opinion, this is where the hobby starts to go to people's heads. Get out and go and listen to more live music to adjust your ears to what an orchestra actually sounds like. Are you sure that what you were hearing was actually what it was supposed to sound like and you are so used to listening to reproduced music that you think that it sounded wrong? The majority of acoustic recordings are plenty skewed and that they are just poor representations of the original performance to begin with (especially multi-mic atrocities like Deutsche Grammaphone recordings).

Lakefrontroad hello, I haven't read all of the above posts and I can imagine that you drew quite a bit of flak upon yourself. All the same, you pose an interesting question.
As far as I am concerned and objectively speaking, there is no question of course, that unless you listen in a really lousy accoustical space, live music will clobber even the best of setups. The ease and naturalness in which the sound spreads from a live event, the myriad of different overtones, which bloom and eddy over the main body of the soundfield, will remind you, how utterly poor and unsatisfactory your rig at home basically is! Looking at the question subjectively however, can be quite a different kettle of fish. Concertgoing and musician friends of mine have remarked to me often enough, that they rather prefer listening to a given piece of classical music at my place compared to a life concert. Even the musicians found, that they could far better follow either the composer's intent, the musical architecture of a given piece, or a given interpretation of it, in front of my wall of stators than in the hall. And this not from one, but from many persons. I suppose the answer lies in the fact, that halls with much reverb tend to homogenise the sound a lot and probably the intimacy of the listening room also does its bit. So, the terms best or better are subjective at best, but it is an objective fact, that especially as a far as "bloom" and timing are concerend, no system I have ever heard will even come close to the life event.