Which is better, live performance or on your system?

I think it depends on the type of music. I jump at the chance to go to Lincoln Center to hear the NY philharmonic
but I am also a big jazz fan and the last venue I attended at the Beacon Theatre left me wondering if I would get hearing damage it was so loud. My claim is this: for classical I jump at the chance to catch a concert but for jazz my ears are more comfortable at home.

It blows my mind that someone would actually compare their stereo to a live classical performance and use their audio system as the benchmark. In my opinion, this is where the hobby starts to go to people's heads. Get out and go and listen to more live music to adjust your ears to what an orchestra actually sounds like. Are you sure that what you were hearing was actually what it was supposed to sound like and you are so used to listening to reproduced music that you think that it sounded wrong? The majority of acoustic recordings are plenty skewed and that they are just poor representations of the original performance to begin with (especially multi-mic atrocities like Deutsche Grammaphone recordings).

Lakefrontroad hello, I haven't read all of the above posts and I can imagine that you drew quite a bit of flak upon yourself. All the same, you pose an interesting question.
As far as I am concerned and objectively speaking, there is no question of course, that unless you listen in a really lousy accoustical space, live music will clobber even the best of setups. The ease and naturalness in which the sound spreads from a live event, the myriad of different overtones, which bloom and eddy over the main body of the soundfield, will remind you, how utterly poor and unsatisfactory your rig at home basically is! Looking at the question subjectively however, can be quite a different kettle of fish. Concertgoing and musician friends of mine have remarked to me often enough, that they rather prefer listening to a given piece of classical music at my place compared to a life concert. Even the musicians found, that they could far better follow either the composer's intent, the musical architecture of a given piece, or a given interpretation of it, in front of my wall of stators than in the hall. And this not from one, but from many persons. I suppose the answer lies in the fact, that halls with much reverb tend to homogenise the sound a lot and probably the intimacy of the listening room also does its bit. So, the terms best or better are subjective at best, but it is an objective fact, that especially as a far as "bloom" and timing are concerend, no system I have ever heard will even come close to the life event.

A Haydn or Beethoven quartet was not meant for large scale public performance. If there was a 19th row in the hall I can easily imagine many of the a'goners haveing a better musical experience in their sweet spot. Bill, try the Quatour Mosaique performances of Haydn or Beethoven on original instruments, they are superb performances. The recording would sound better that most halls 10th row. But I've had a live string quartet between my Dunlavy's and there is no doubt about my system's faults.

For me, even though I own a system that cost me about $33,000 to date, and as good as it sounds to me, a live performance is a live performance, and a CD on a $200,000 stereo is, and will always sound like a CD on a good stereo. Granted, it will sound better on some Mark Levenson gear than it will on a $1000 Sony system, but will lack the emotion that I feel from a live show. To me, they are two separate entities. I derive great enjoyment from both