Pubul57, Something fun to try is to listen to a live performance and see if you can place the mics in such a way that a 2 channel playback over speakers has the same perspective as your ears. This is usually not an easy thing to do, but when I was preparing to record Canto General, I had convinced the ensemble to rehearse for the final week in the concert hall. So I had a week to goof off with mic placement, set up a nice playback rig on location and the like.
IF you have time to do it, a recording can be made that will sound remarkably like what it sounds like if you were sitting where the mics are. In most recordings, the mics are often **above** the ensemble, which produces an odd perspective, unless you happen to know that that is where the mics are placed.
Modern mics are remarkably sensitive- with them you can hear things in the hall that you would not notice with your ears! One time I had robins chirping in the mikes- hear it as plain as day over the monitors, but stand by the mic stands and you could not hear them. I found an open door in the rear of the hall... the robins were outside.
Another thing to keep in mind that will help you understand how realistic or not a system is being, is the model of what it should sound like. Don't think for a second that the system is going to sound like the hall- it isn't. It **can** sound, and very convincingly, like your listening room is grafted onto a space (which might be a hall) wherein the music is happening. A real hall will have hall sounds beside and behind you. Your system will have the real hall sound in front, but your room sounds beside and behind you. If you keep this model in mind, you will see that we are a lot closer to the Absolute Sound than most folks think. For a long time and to this day, the bottleneck is the media, not the playback!
