Thoughts on the most difficult instruments for speakers to reproduce?

@vinylfan. Agreed, even with the best equipment, a poor recording won't sound good, however too often people blame the recording whilst it is the equipment not capable of reproducing what's on the recording. Not many speakers will be able to reproduce the dynamics of percussion to the full extend. Most rooms will not allow to enjoy such dynamics to the full extend either. It's always a bit of a compromise I guess. On the other hand, using higher end (not necessarily the highest end) audio equipment will indeed often reveal that the recording wasn't done properly.  

Completely agree. I think we spend far too much time (and money) on equipment variation and not enough on recordings quality. This has been a constant challenge and frustration over the years, first with vinyls (dirty, worn, warped, and poorly engineered), and now with digital.  Few dig recordings come with a provenance and are a real crap shoot. I still haven’t figured out what “remastered”even means, it definitely doesn’t assure that it isn’t just an upsampled dupe of the original cd made 15 years ago. Recording quality is the most important piece in the chain, because no matter what equipment comes after it, it is still garbage in garbage out. Ironically often times the better the equipment the worse it sounds, because it doesn’t hide the warts. All I know is that half the recordings I download from jd tracks land up unplayed. There is one benefit over vinyl though, at least they don’t collect dust. 

Voice cymbals piano

1) Piano (analog or digital)

2) Tutti strings played on bow (digital)

3) Cymbals (analog or digital)

(in any order)

piano

due to the nature of the instrument it is also very hard to mic well for a recording

that is part of the problem... garbage in garbage out