I've been in recording studios and made a few recordings with local bands,and some local airplay on a PBS blues station.
I have a decent stereo, in fact I've had several cutting edge systems since the mid 80's,and I have a friend with a system that is not just as expensive as a couple of new homes, but also sounds very realitsic,but the owner ,an avid concert goer, says that even this is nothing close to what he hears in a live event.But he hasn't given up on his quest to further improve his sound.But he isn't fooled.
I stopped trying to keep up with him.
The advancements he's made are too expensive for me to indulge in, so I'll leave it up to him fight the good fight.
I've listened to this system evolve over the years, and even his full blown Scarlatti digital set up and his SME 30/12 fails to make a recording of a Marine Band harmonica become anything more real than what it is, a recording of a harmonica.
Any recording of a harmonica and the system playing it back adds and subtracts so much information from the original, that,the better the system the more you can distinguish, live from reproduced. Or so you should.
This is perhaps what you find so troubling, that the closer you get to reality, the more you can hear that the reality you are hearing is indeed a reproduction.
For example the less resolution a photo has of the real painting of Mona Lisa the more the two will resemble each other and be harder to tell what is real and what is the reproduction.
As it is in audio, the more resolution of the system, the more you hear into the recording, the venue and all the other things that make it so much different than what you would hear in your own home , and you can use any instrument you may have at your disposal.
I've heard some high res downloads at my well healed friend's(yes he's big into this now)and the results are very good on some material.
I could easily hear that Neil Young was playing a harmonica on the Massey hall cuts,just like I could tell that Perry Mason was played by Raymond Burr back in the 50's. on my parent's first TV.
The fact that I could tell it was a harmonica and not a trumpet would be quite apparant on any system.
Now was it a Marine band? Perhaps.
I know it wasn't a Lee Oscar, they weren't available of course.
But was that harmonica right there in the room with me?Did it sound just the same as it would if my friend played one of his harmonicas?
No it sounded like the harmonica that Neil Young played that night in Massey hall as recorded by his tape deck and played back thru a hifi system.
Even with hundreds of thousands of dollars in a well set up room with all the bells and whistles of exotic power cords and wires and conditioning, it wasn't real, and neither of us were buying that it was.But we enjoyed it, even more as we discovered hidden details that made it perfecrtly clear that this was a recording.
Now here's a few examples of how people were fooled in the past.
The old live vs recording contests done back in the 1950s.
AR speakers I believe ,they had a great many people convinced that what was actually recorded music was real live performers.The gear was pretty primitive compared to todays reproducers as far as accuracy goes.
Also remember the adds for cassette tape from TDK, the sound was so real, it would blow you right out of the chair.
Again, no where near the resolution of todays gear, and yet the folks were fooled, or so the ads would lead us to believe.
Just a couple of examples of how low resolution can fool us into believing it's the real thing.
I am saying that high res systems do the opposite.
They expose the details that distinguish between a live musical event and a recorded one, and that makes it easier to tell the differences.
Now some folks prefer to be fooled.
Some folks find it more pleasing to the ear to listen to systems that are not revealing,they want the music to have soul,they want it warm and romantic,they find systems that reveal the music warts and all to be too sterile and find it fatiguing.
In other words they prefer to listen to music without all the added information and find systems to match their preference.
These people mostly prefer vintage gear, because it is not as resolving of all the inner detail that the better new gear is capable of.
No one is or should be tied down to either preference.
One is true to the source, one is not.One is true to the heart, the other true to the ear.
You choose what speaks to you
Now back to my listening session with the high end goodies.
You could hear the faint echo of the hall, the sound of the harmonic in it, the sound of the faint tape hiss on his stage tape recorder.
All that was there in the hall to hear was there in his system, and yet it still wasn't real.
It wasn't as imediate as the sound of a harp played back in his living room.There were differences, and many of them.There were a lot of clues that revealed this is a recording, it's not real.
The same as there are a lot of clues when you listen to an unrecorded instrument,or the lack of such clues would be a better way to put it.A lack of the effects of the recording process that are absent live which are there when recorded and played back on a hifi rig.
A resolving system doesn't blur the lines between live and real,it only puts them into sharper contrast.
However, what we heard was the sound of his harmonica of whatever make, being reproduced by a microphone, perhaps Shure 57 or 58, and all the cabling into the tape recorder.I was perhaps more there at the venue than he was there at my friends.
Which was pretty good considering the time of the recording and how it was recorded
So let's forget about all the electronic circuits adding and subtracting from the "real" sound of a harmonica,let's focus on what the engineer and old Neil himself felt about the sound of those raw tapes.
Should we add some more reverb and make the sound of the venue more pronounced, should we take some away,and make his harp sound larger that it is in real life?
Probably added a little of this, take away a little of that, and there you have it, their take on what the Marine Band harmonica as played by Neil Young should sound like.
So we really don't have a pure sound of what that harp sounds like do we.It's sound has been altered , the whole recording process alters it, the hall altered it, and my stereo, my friend's stereo, and even your stereo is altering and distorting it even more from reality.
So I am not doubting that to you thru your system,you can hear no difference between a recording of a Marine Band harp and your own live playing of it.
You 've stated that you do, in fine fashion I should add.
All I am saying is that I can't say the same about any of the systems that I am familiar with or have ever been familiar with.
I have never in my experience, ever been fooled by a recording thinking that it was a real event.
Perhaps it's knowing what goes on behind the scenes that skews my perception, but I also trust my ears, and so far, live is live and reproduced is reproduced.I can hear the studio trickery, and gimmicks that aren't there in real life.
And the better resolving the system,the easier it is for me to tell the difference between live and recorded.
This is the paradox.The more we seek reality and higher resolution, the less we are fooled into believing that what we hear is real.
It's the dirty little secret some folks don't want you to know.
