How important is it for you to attain a holographic image?

For me, it isn't a matter of whether or not holographic imaging is heard live; live is one thing, recordings another. If soundstaging is inherent in a recording and your system isn't reproducing it, what else is it missing?

It was Harry Pearson and The Absolute Sound who made imaging and soundstaging a priority, to a degree beyond my desires. I will admit that the first time I heard the great depth in a recording (Holst's The Planets, Boult on EMI, iirc) reproduced by a system (a complete Decca/ARC/Magneplanar Tympani system set up by Bill Johnson), I found the sound of a tiny little triangle being played way at the back of the orchestra thrilling. It actually appeared to be further away than was the wall behind the speakers!

As it is for others, my priority in reproduced music is lifelike timbre, especially that of singing voices. Of them I cannot abide any degree of added coloration. Next is transparency---hearing though the equipment back to the recording itself. The one aspect of imaging important to me is that of instrument size and height, though those are not exactly the same; you can have either without the other.

I neglected to include the following: I very much appreciate and concur with the feelings of Art Dudley and Herb Reichert, that "forward musical momentum", touch, and full color saturation of instrumental timbre is extremely important in the reproduction of music. But of what value are those if Tony Rice’s guitar, Jerry Douglas’ dobro, and Alison Krauss’ vocals have had their color "temperature" (to make a photographic analogy) changed? Or if the sound is so lacking in transparency as to make the instruments difficult to hear? I did however include their criteria of scale (I call it instrumental size and height).

But I left out my number two priority (second only to lack of timbral coloration), that of immediacy. If you’ve heard a direst-to-disk LP and/or Decca/London cartridge, you know what I mean by that. A "startling alive", fully fleshed out, 3-dimensional human being(s) standing right in front of you in the room. So real you feel you could reach out and touch him, her, or them. That’s for small-scale music, obviously. For large scale, it is the massive presence of an orchestra in a concert hall or cathedral, all its members hitting the opening notes of a composition with enough force to knock your head back!

I recall reading Pearson discussing transparency, and was very surprised to see him say about a system that it was transparent in the same way a live instrument is transparent. If you're like me, you might be thinking "Wait, if a live instrument were transparent, you wouldn't hear (see) it". A system, and recording, are transparent TO the original; the original can't be transparent!