Rwbadley: Not wacky. A couple of years ago we brought in a string trio to play for a function at our house, and they were seated in the area of the living room right in-between the system and where my listening chair normally resides. I was a little surprised during their performances to realize that if I closed my eyes while listening to them play, I couldn't really locate the individual players in space with any sense of precision.
In fact, not only wasn't there a feeling of 'pinpoint imaging', but I also couldn't describe the sound as being 'detailed', 'present', 'bloomy', 'finely resolved', blah blah blah etc. I couldn't even say it seemed especially dynamically unrestricted compared to playing recordings through my system in the same space. Rather, it sounded quite unremarkable from a standpoint of audiophile terminology - somewhat amorphous and congealed together, a little murky and rolled-off in the treble, spatially a bit small and not terribly dimensional, and not nearly as 'involving' or 'easy to follow' as I expected. Sonically underwhelmed would be a fair despription of my overall reaction. (All this is leaving the attributes of the performance itself to the side - we're talking about a pick-up group sight-reading without prior rehearsal for the occasion, so there was some shaky ensemble and intonation among the inevitable flubs and misses.)
Part of this I'm sure had to do with the less-than-ideal performance-acoustic attributes of my listening room as well as the background noise of the party, but still, I was probably the only person there who was thinking about any of this crap - and not simply because I was probably the only audiophile in the place, but specifically because this performance was occurring where I normally listen to my own system. That it didn't necessarily sound 'impressive' by comparison speaks not only to the fallability of the "They are here" paradigm, but confirms for me that a whole lot of what we talk about in relation to reproduced sound qualities are in truth largely artifacts of the record/playback processes, and not inherent to the original performance itself. That truth doesn't invalidate those technical processes, or the ways in which we verbally deconstruct what they accomplish, but it does help keep me mindful of the reality of what I'm dealing with when I listen critically at home.
