As others have stipulated, the listening room's added reflections are distortions. But we need to always keep in mind that "what the mics heard" was insufficient to represent what a human listener at the event would have perceived, and that what they did hear was judged largely based on the engineer's experience of monitoring and mastering in control rooms that are neither performance spaces nor anechoic chambers, and about what type of finished product will sound best played back in a typical home listening room through typical home speakers. A recording is not an objective 'verite' account of what happened, but a subjectively molded account derived from certain common assumptions intrinsically embedded in the production and reproduction processes - one of which is that there will be some liveliness to the listening room.
This also goes to my point about a speaker's radiation pattern and the acceptance pattern of the mics not necessarily being commensurate, but quite possibly incompatible, if we want to minmize listening room reflections by limiting dispersion (and often even if we don't). The simplistic assertion, made by some speaker manufacturers, that speaker radiation must somehow mimic microphone acceptance is further undermined by the implicit, but false, assumption that all recordings will be minimally mic'ed and that we can even know the acceptance patterns of the mics used, much less their positioning. For recordings assembled from multi-mono multi-mic'ing, and of course for electrical direct-injection into a recording console, the relationship simply doesn't exist at all. A more pertinent relationship might be that of the radiation pattern of the mixing and mastering monitors to that of the home speakers, but of course that can't be a consistent thing. In the final analysis, the best way to assess speaker radiation pattern must be subjective auditioning in the room in which they will be placed, using the kind of music which will be played through them, by the person who will be doing the listening.
About Karl's point #2, although it's true to a certain extent that if the listening room could match the recording venue, then the overlayed refections would be more "consistent", they would still be just as distorting. And the problem would be worse the larger and livelier the two rooms were. However, for smaller and relatively 'dead' rooms, I think we have some evidence in favor of this hypothesis, however unimportantly. Many of us will own some of Rudy van Gelder's vintage Blue Note jazz recordings (mono or stereo), hundreds of the earlier ones of which were taped right in his New Jersey home's furnished living room, employing minimal mic'ing. Despite the facts that these recordings are bandwidth-limited, afflicted with dynamic distortions, and subject off-axis and less-proximate instruments to premature roll-off, nevertheless many can display a scary amount of the familiar quality of sounding especially 'real' when listened to from another part of the house outside the listening room, where their flaws are not only less obvious, but where the direct and reflected room sounds have melded into one indirect sound deviod of specific spatial cues, regardless of the speakers used. In this narrow sense, these records can rather easily exceed higher-fidelity concert hall or studio recordings. My theory has long been that this is precisely because they were recorded in an acoustic environment presumably very similar to most people's playback environments. Try it sometime...
