How close to the real thing?

Lrsky,I know what you are talking about some speakers having treble glare or bright system characteristics.I won't have that in my system.I know what instruments sound like.I have musicians in my family.The conductor in an orchestra gets one of the best listening spots.I've stood there.They do get to hear a lot more than we can,in the audience.Mikes placed in the right spots get to hear a lot of what anyone sitting in the audience can't.Sitting in the audience can be like sitting in a room full of misplaced, room tuning,sound absorption devices.Just standing up improves what you can hear in an auditorium. I've been in quite a lot. Listening to a lot of live music still leaves me enjoying,nicely done,recorded music,at home. The musicians in my family enjoy recorded music also.

I wonder how anyone could put a percentage on recorded vs. live music either.I think the ones that have a problem with recorded music,may have a system that is not up doing what it should correctly.

A new thought (for me) on this topic: Perhaps the disparity of the 90%+ from the 5% crowd is the difference of the folks who listen to the music (laid back types)(90%'ers) and the folks who listen to the equipment (Audiophile Nervosa types) (5%'ers) LOL
Whole new pair of cans of plastic worms to rattle the cage!!

Maybe y'all will be interested in this- it seems relevant to the thread...

Recently I was in the recording studio, we were trying to make a recording of my band. Our bass player is leaving town for a while, and we didn't want to forget some new material, so we were making a simple recording to help us with that.

I set up a pair of Neumann U-67s in a figure-8 pattern. They went into a cheap Mackey mixer, from there into an Alesis Masterlink, recording at 88.2KHz with 24 bits.

On playback, I used a set of Grado SR325 headphones. This is an open style of headphone. All the time, I had to look at the bass player, or our drummer, to see what they were doing. That is to say, the sound was so real I could not tell that they were not doing something while I was trying to listen to the recording. So I had to look at them to see that they were actually *not* playing! I could not turn my back on them, because if I did so, my brain was telling me right away that they were playing their instruments, rather than me listening to a recording.

In previous recording experiences (again with headphones) I have experienced the same thing.

So how far are we? The microphones and headphones have been there for quite some time. Microphone preamps and a lot of the other intervening electronics have been too.

So where is the technology weak? That seems to be a better question. Just from playing in the studio, that question is easy to answer. Speakers, power amplifiers and the actual media itself are the problems. Anyone who has released a CD knows that the biggest degradation in the sound from the master to playback occurs in the process of making the CD itself. Also I have grave doubts about 44.1 KHz 16 bits and always have.

Some amps and some speakers are so realistic that if you give them a direct microphone feed, they can easily fool you into thinking that the music is really happening. Others are not so nimble. If we had recordings in which the media was not damaged by mass reproduction (and in specific not damaged by a CD player, which if it is using Redbook standards has no hope of extracting all the data off the disk), we would also be closer. But to really do it right, you need a higher scan frequency and more bits. Or analog.

So IMO we are not far away at all. 90% of what I am talking about here are the issues with media, the remaining 10% is the difference between actual state of the art amps and speakers and those that purport to be.

I agree with Atmasphere on this one.

The barrier is/has not been the technology, more the technique applied in making recordings.

The best ones can be eerily close to lifelike in the right situation and it has been that way for quite a while, probably as far back as the golden age of vinyl.