Fidelity vs. Musicality...........Is there a tug of War?

When you go to a live, unamplified performance, of a small jazz group, or even a symphony orchestra, do you sit there and say to yourself ... "Oh my God! ... listen to that detail?" 

Music first. Fidelity second.

Frank

I want to change my response.

 'Musicality' rests (or should I think) in a listener's reaction to a performance, not to his audio system. I offer two examples, Richters live Sofia performance of Mussorgsky's  'Pictures' and Zlata Chovhieva' performance of Chopin's Etudes. The former is in terrible audio yet the performance is by most any standard great(est?). It is dramatic in a way that most are not and it draws you in. Chochieva's Chopin is a different approach, a more lyrical one and in pretty good 'audio' as well. It's a more relaxed experience, one that I like in this music. If I had the best audio system I could not enjoy these performances more!

I could easily improve my audio system, lots of room to grow. But would I like these recording more, I don't think so.

FWIW

HiFi is dead...long live musicality whatever that is.

"...A false dichotomy is created...to support one’s budgetary constraints, the decision to accept a certain level of performance..."

Doug. I can't agree with this. I don't have any budget constraints (well compared to most anyway) but I prefer a musical system. Sure a top level system with the right recording can sound amazing but most of the music I listen to is just standard production crap that is unlistenable on a highly analytical system. I'd rather have good sounding playback than 100% perfect playback that sounds terrible. I have my lessor systems on all the time, my big rig mostly sits dormant.  

Nada.
Listen to some music on instead of inventing brain twisters.
+1 for Russ.
Doug is just reviewing the silly question.
Meh