Thank you, russ69, for posting this provocative and essential question.
For a long time, I've shared the dogma of "the absolute sound": that the goal of a fine audio system is to recreate the aural experience of a live (acoustic) concert. Perhaps for this reason, I've considered good recordings of solo instruments (e.g., piano, cello, violin, guitar) or small ensembles (string quartets, chamber orchestras) as the "gold standard" by means of which to judge musical reproduction. Rock concerts are already electronic events, after all, and so subject to amplifier distortion, poor hall acoustics, crowd noise and many other factors beyond one's control, while large orchestras in grand concert halls produce a sheer size of sound not realistically achievable in one's living room. Expecting otherwise is a little like expecting to be as impressed by a photograph of a mountainscape as one would be by the real thing: sheer scale has a lot to do with the impact.
But I've since come to a different view. Music enjoyed in one's living room (or music room) is, in many ways, actually superior aurally to almost any live performance. The holographic presentation of "soundstage," for example, can be pretty astonishing on a good stereo in a room with favorable acoustics: with eyes closed (or even with eyes open!), one can "see" each instrument in spatial relation to every other, enabling the listener to follow a particular musical voice most easily by somehow "keeping one's eye on" the performer producing that melody or line of counterpoint. I've tried to do this when attending live concerts; it's rarely as vivid as it can be in my living room.
And as for rock music, "concert volume" is, in my experience, almost always so loud, and so distorted, as to be painful. Listening to a well-recorded studio rock album at high volume (110 db or more) is thrilling, visceral, and yet also crystal clear: the same detail as at modest volume, undistorted by crowd noise, overdriven amplifiers, and who knows what.
None of which is to say that we should not patronize live performances. But the difference between attending a live performance and listening to a good recording on a fine audio system at home is a little like the difference between attending a live stage play and watching a filmed version of a live stage play in a well-appointed media room. The frisson of the crowd, the sense that those are real people up there, the tension of knowing mistakes could happen...these things add an excitement to the "live" event that, of course, no "canned" version could hope to even approximate. Not to mention that it represents a demonstration of respect for the artists who produce the music we love when we go to "see" them in person, a fleeting experience we can't possess except in our memories.
