Top two most important sound qualities

immersion

micro-dynamics

@larsman No, of course you can’t. Just as you can’t fool youself into thinking you’re sitting front row in the Concertgebouw Amsterdam (to give an example I’m familiar with) hearing a performance of Mahler 6 (or any other large scale orchestral score). But every once in a while you sit in front of your speakers and your usual disbelief gets suspended for a moment and you almost feel teleported to the venue. That’s when the ’gestalt’ of the live music event is somehow faithfully reproduced in your own space. When this happens your brain gets tricked into thinking it’s hearing the real thing. It’s those moments when even your cat takes notice and this experience is what any audiophile aspires to. These are usually few and far between, but a well balanced system can get you there more often.

@cdc ’immediacy’ is an even better word for the kind of realism I was trying to describe. One could say immediacy is what distinguishes the real thing from a recording. Just think of street musicians. Even from a distance and without visual contact you simply ’know’ when they’re playing live. Whether they use amplification doesn’t matter. It will sound completely different from recorded sound, even when it comes from speakers outside the adjacent store just a few feet away, no matter how loud they go.

This would seem to suggest that ’live immediacy’ already gets lost during the recording process. So any playback system, no matter how good, is at the mercy of the recording quality.

Indeed - the best you can possibly get is what the producer and other tech people can put on the source. And of course the 'source' can sound very different even in the same venue and performance depending on where you are. But yeah, that's great when you can get transported that way! 

Going into detailed descriptions of the meanings given to a couple qualitative terms and the factors needed for enhancing them is really interesting.

Well said, guys. Expressive and colorful articulation without getting too poetic or prozaic.