Jim Lesurf wrote:

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.

It's quite true that you can't hear a reference for certain material,
because you'll never hear what (say) Kraftwerk heard in their studio in
1976 or what Laurie Anderson heard in her head.

However, if you know what an ordinary human voice sounds like, and a
piano and a violin, and you know that your hi-fi does a good job of
rendering those in your sitting room, you can listen to Kraftwerk or
Laurie Anderson and have a reasonable degree of confidence that you're
hearing a good rendition of what you should be hearing.

On top of that, even if you listen to something that has no reference,
so that you don't know whether a certain pleasing colouration is part of
it or just a lucky anomaly of your playback system, you can hear the
same thing on another system and realise that one reveals more than the
other, or one is able to present details that the other cannot, and
that's another reasonable and not entirely subjective basis for judging
that one might be better than the other - even in the absence of of a
"real" sound to make your comparisons with.

Daniele