In article , Mike Fleming
wrote:

A fair amount of non-classical music is performed for recordings only
and never played live. But you're rather making my point, the engineer
decides what the real sound is, so, if you want the real sound that the
engineer decided on, you need a high fidelity system.

Indeed. And for material like R3 broadcasts of concerts, having some idea
of what being there sounds like can help you to decide if what your hi-fi
is producing is a decent representation. Becoming familiar with the sound
of such performances in halls can be a useful guide.

However for some other types of recording, there will be no acoustic
'original' beyond what someone sitting at a mixing desk created as they
operated the controls to get a result they think will 'sell', or have
impact or please their target audience. Using a setup you would never get
to hear and which is unlike home hi-fi systems. In those cases you can't
access such a reference so just have to decide if you like the result or
not.

Jim

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