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I get 70 of the Live Symphony Experience at home

I am starting this thread as an offshoot of another thread in which I was assured many experts insist that the best home systems can only reproduce about 10-15% of the live concert hall experience. This seems preposterous to me, and I wanted to explore it more, and hear how the experts make this claim. My take:
While it is clear that no system really reproduces the concert hall (or even tougher, the organ-in-a-cathedral)experience, a good system will let you follow the melody and rhythm of a piece, will let you identify and differentiate instruments from one another, will give you an idea of how many instruments are playing and where in the hall they are located, as well as some sense of the size of the hall. A powerful dynamic system will also let you feel some of the excitement created by a big symphonic crescendo. It will approximate, to a degree, the richness and silkiness of instruments so that if you know what they really sound like, you can, in your head, remember what that sound is. I think this is certainly more than 10% of the concert experience. What is missing? The sudden plop and decay of a pizzicato violin string? The barely audible but terrifying roll of a bass drum as it sneaks up behind other instruments? The silky sheen of bowed strings and the well-oiled burnished sound of brass? Yes, all of these things are important and missing, but do they make up 90% of the music? If so, WOULD YOU BE WILLING TO GIVE UP THE 10% YOU HAVE FOR THE 90% YOU'RE MISSING? Then what would you have? The sense of sitting in a big hall, with some cool ethereal sounds from instruments that you can't identify? The sound of musicians tuning up before the music starts? Would you really give up all other recorded music to hear John Cage's Silent Symphony perfectly reproduced in your living room? I certainly wouldn't.
Maybe I misunderstand. Is it that going from an ordinary system to a mega-buck high end system only gets you 10% closer? This I could accept.
It is senseless to quibble over small numerical differences (10%vs.15%), but any number in that range is saying we are missing a lot more music than we are getting, and this I can not agree with. Block out 90% of a photograph, and you probably won't be able to identify its subject.
I'm usually a pretty calm person, but this has just driven me crazy. Let me know what you think.
honest1
newbee
4,751 posts
 
When I go to a concert at Symphony Hall I get 100% of a live music experience. Good enuf for me.

When I go into my music room and crank up the audio system I get 100% of a recorded music 'experience', at least within the capabilities of my set up to reproduce the recording. Good enuf for me.

Lets see, 100% live, 100% recorded, equals 200% music experience. Wow, how lucky can I be? :-)
mrtennis
3,295 posts
 
i'll go with 10 %. what is especially missing in the timbral accuracy of instruments at a live performance. the recording doesn't help you capture the naturalness of timbre and then the stereo system adds its "errors".

i think one should accept the deficiencies and go on from there.

getting 10 % or less, depending upon the quality of the reproduction (e.g., a table radio) should not stop you from listening to symphonies at home. you can certainly enjoy the music even if the sound is not of high quality.

people listened to music on "lo fi systems" over 60 years ago and did not complain.
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uru975
684 posts
 
Wish I could recall the source but memory, or what's left of it says it was either a record producer or an analogue designer said that at best we get 10-15% of what's on the source. Just another example of the best is yet to come.
shadorne's avatar
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shadorne
7,467 posts
 
I am not sure where this came from but yes it is true that only a fraction of the music sounds like live and it is two factors

1) Dynamic range of most home systems are sadly limited
2) Dynamic range of recordings are almost all compressed to suit 1) above.

The rare occurrence when the source music has realistic dynamic range and when it is played on a system that can actually reproduce it without distortion is indeed well below 10% of even high end audio. The lack of dynamic range is usually a dead give away that it is not live...even on such high end systems where timbrel accuracy can be near perfect (at low volumes).
honest1 OP
586 posts
 
If you strip away 90% of the timbral accuracy of an instrument, what are you left with? A fundamental frequency and some discordant buzzing? Every instrument would sound like a test tone or worse. We can easily hear 5% Harmonic distortion - what would a system with 90% harmonic distortion sound like? You would not be able to recognize a single instrument. Mathematically, if timbral accuracy is what's missing most, you would have even less than 10% timbral accuracy in order to average out to 10% overall musical content.
I agree with Shadorne - dynamic range is definitely lacking in just about every system and recording. Is this what people mean? I could perhaps believe that we are only getting 10% of the dynamic range of much music.
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