Thanks for this original post. This is a subject that I have thought much about over the years. In fact, I wrote a letter to the editor of Stereophile more than 20 years ago about this same topic. My point was that after going to over a hundred live music events of nearly every genre I had never heard live music that sounded as good as my stereo. They published my letter and titled it "Better than Live?"
Yes, I prefer the sound quality of my system over live music. It is clearer, the imaging is better, the instruments are more distinguishable, and I have control over the volume. I do enjoy the experience of live music but the criteria for a great concert are very different than listening to my stereo.
From the mid 90's to the mid 2000's I had a recording studio in my house and I recorded local bands in the Portland, OR area. From female singer/songwriter to doom metal, I went to all my client's shows. The live events were enjoyable, even thrilling, but trust me, I never had the objective of recreating their live sound. I've also been to numerous jazz shows and a modest number of classical concerts. It sort of became a joke to me. No matter how much I enjoyed the concert it made me appreciate how wonderfully my system played a well executed recording.
We are kidding ourselves if we think that the goal of our systems is to recreate the live experience. How do I know that? Because if that's what we wanted to do, all live recordings would consist of a stereo pair of microphones placed at the optimum listening spot in the audience. We have hundreds of examples of this (bootlegs, Grateful Dead tapes) and you can hear that these recordings are lousy compared to a professionally produced recording using several microphones plus feeds from the mixing board. How many classical recordings do you have that are a simple stereo pair? I will bet that the best sounding classical recordings in your collection were done with multiple microphones and likely even used microsecond delays on each channel to align the signal and give a cleaner hall sound. The engineer manipulates and processes the sound to the extent that it sounds very different that what you actually heard at the concert.
One of the previous posts talked about a Ray Bryant piano concert. The piano had 4 microphones!!! Does anybody really think that it takes 4 micophones to replicate what an audience member should hear from a large acoustic piano? Again, the goal of reproducing the fidelity of natural acoustic music in an open space is an audiophile fallacy.
So, if we are not really interested in making a recording of what you actually hear in the audience, what are we trying to accomplish? Producers and recording engineers are trying to make something that sounds like what you think you heard. It's a heavily photoshopped version of the blurry, diffuse, mediocre sounding event you actually would hear if you were there.
Part of why I feel this way is that imaging is very important to me. My system is very good in this regard and I can pinpoint the location of voices and instruments precisely in the soundstage, depth included. When I recorded I learned the tricks to accomplish this illusion and I appreciate the craft of the recording engineers to achieve this. All I can say is thank goodness they didn't just try to recreate the sound of live music.