The focus and air lie

First row balcony - this sounds like a reasonable choice in a tall but not too deep hall with 1500-2500 seats listening to 19th Century compositions. Tchaikovsky in Carnegie, for example. In Fisher Hall the balcony is mushy, but then the whole hall sounds like steamy oatmeal. Even in narrow but deep Boston the balcony has less articulation than my preferred seats which are usually 10th row center.

I mainly go to smaller venues because of the intimacy and clarity. I also prefer Baroque sized orchestras - five to twenty five players. Try Jordan Hall during the Boston Early Music Festival, chamber music in Weill Auditorium or Zankel Hall. The latter does not have a mediocre seat in the house. Just leave if they use speakers - halls that have reverberation designed for acoustic music sound awful with reinforcement.

This is how I like recordings too - definition and subtle detail in reproduction. Pinpoint imaging? No! That is an exaggeration of any live situation and always has bad trade-offs.

I adore crispness in the direct sound, spatial accuracy and proper roll-off in the echoes (air absorbs high frequencies) from a good impulse response - is that a quantifiable attribute that resembles "focus and air"?

I seek sonic intimacy as defined by Beranek but I have yet to hear anything resembling "warm" or "fat" that was not a distorted impediment between myself and the musicians. Most tube amps sound veiled or muddy, as do most halls. This euphonia is the lie to me.

"That's a shame because a hifi system should be able to trasmit music soul even on bad recording.
In 2008 this is a very rare quality."

Maybe our technology these days is just too resolving and revealing and we don't like what we hear as much as a result.

Maybe we should do what television producers do to deal with flaws in human appearance on HD TV: put more make-up on our performers, ie degrade recording quality on purpose in order to add more "soul".

Maybe this also has something to do with the seeming popularity of tubes and vinyl with audio buffs these days.

"Walk outside your house at 3am and listen to the birds chirping. One is three feet away and the other is thirty feet away. Ten more are in between. How do you tell they are separated? What is between them? How many terms does it take? "

I like this test scenario for air very much!

Is there a test recording out there that does anything like this?

I understand what you are trying to say Thompson9015. When I was a kid listening to music on a cassette and recording my favorite music off the radio (that's true downloading before MP3)onto an old used cassette because that was all I could afford, I did not think I was missing out on anything.

Does one need a highend rig to enjoy or appreciate music? No. However in my case it will help.......no make you appreciate and enjoy music more.

Sineburst - there is an interesting paper in the latest AES journal on concert halls - you will be pleased to know that Boston is rated very highly and its dimensions are based on a famous hall in Europe ( also Sabine from Harvard got involved in the design ). Anyway the paper is fascinating stuff - it lists several features that have been found to be important in the acoustics of a great concert hall. Anyway - it is more interesting then circular philosphical arguments on Audiogon that a radio is good enough to appreciate msuic and that, by similar logic, the qualities of a concert hall are not important to music appreciation - anyway there is a chance you come away with some deeper understanding if you were to delve into this paper....