Does anyone know where this J. Gordon Holt comes from?

For myself, trying to recreate the live sound of whatever I’m listening to is exactly what I’m trying to do. I really enjoy systems that can sound live as opposed to highly detailed, overly etched “hifi” that like many high end speakers do. 

If you read Holt’s reviews from the 60’s of the large speakers of the day, Altecs, EV, Bozak, he described them as 1st row, 10th row, mid venue etc. This clearly was his standard of reference also.

I have a big room, very nice horn loaded speakers & a good, powerful tube amp. When I play Eva Cassidy’s Nightbird ( recorded live at a small club), you could easily believe you’re at the show. It’s loud, very dynamic, clear, full of body & a ton of fun!! Even the talking in between a few songs & the audience clapping sounds right on. 
 

Unfortunately, w/ today’s heavily digitized & digitally powered line arrays at every rock or blues concert, the sound is really hard & often annoying. This is why for myself, it’s even more important than ever to have a system capable of reproducing sound realistically. For example, I recently went to a Tedeski Trucks Band show in Boston. They’re a great band but the sound was all over the place & I had primo seats. When only a few instruments played, the sound was quite good but when the full group played, it became unclear & lost most of the group’s exquisite nuances. My system, for the most part, with some of the same dongs, sounds better. 

I don't want my music to sound like the real thing - I'd get thrown out of my apartment very quickly and all those amps wouldn't fit anyway.

Besides, what does the real thing sound like? Does an acoustic guitar played outside in the woods sound like the same acoustic guitar played in a shower stall? They're both the 'real thing'.

The 'real thing' is the recording/source, not the performance.  

tomcy6 surely has a point, as several posters have acknowledged: that an audio system should at the very least aspire to "reproduce the sound of real instruments in a real space," just as J. Gordon Holt stated. But... A good friend of mine (who also writes and reviews for Stereophile, by the way) is a musician and a recording engineer, and he insists this dogma is mistaken, for a simple and persuasive reason. What an audio system should aspire to do is to accurately reproduce what the sound engineers heard in the recording booth. Unfortunately, for a lot of reasons (historical, technological, aesthetic...), that sound is not necessarily the same thing as "the sound of real instruments in a real space." 

My point is that Mr. Holt's principle, to which I do subscribe, is compromised by the fact than the listener cannot compensate for whatever was done by the recording engineers. If your system succeeds in making recording #1 sound like "real instruments in a real space," it will fail to do that persuasively on recordings #2 through #n. My guess is that this is at least partly why personal taste in audio equipment—which Mr. Holt rejected as a proper criterion—nevertheless comes into play.

Be that as it may, I still agree with tomcy6: solo acoustic instruments or voice, and small ensembles (chamber music, perhaps up to chamber orchestras if your room is large enough) are the likeliest targets for this aspiration. But that does not mean that rock music can't be very compellingly reproduced in your listening room, of course. A Tool concert is an astonishing assault on one's senses, but listening to Tool LOUD on a good audio system is, in some respects, an even greater treat.

@clearthinker … “Hey, which of us DOESN’T want our rig to SOUND LIKE THE REAL THING???”

Honestly? I think many (most?) try to make it sound better to them…. More detail, more slam… microdetails. That is what I did for the first twenty or twenty five years of my pursuit of the high end… I wanted it to sound better to me. Which was Gordon’s point.

I found when I did that I would make a change that would make one kind of music sound better, then others would not sound as good. I realized I was chasing my tail. 

I needed a ruled with which to judge. I quickly realized that had to be live acoustic music. Only after careful listening and tuning in to what live acoustic music sounded like did my system truly start sounding great… for all forms of music. Over a decade going to the symphony and small jazz concerts… or sitting next to a piano calibrated my ear. My system went from an interesting thing I liked to listen to for a half hour to a completely involving system I have to drag myself away after hours of listening.

I think Gordon was right on point with the pursuit’s goal should be recreating the real musical experience. After all, the musicians have worked endlessly to make tell music as appealing as humanly possible.

@ghdprentice      That's perceptive and I agree with you.  Whilst misguided producers mess when they record acoustic sound in a space, most try to recapture the original event.  Multiple miking of orchestral symphonies just creates an artificial mess.  Did you hear the Zimerman/Rattle Beethoven concertos recorded on DG during the COVID?  I have the LPs.  Pretty well every instrument was individually miked and the signals taken back to a presumably enormous mixing desk where one imagines the producer flexing the sliders in an effort to outthink Beethoven.  In doing so the 'original event' was expunged.  By contrast, those who record orchestras with a simple stereo pair can produce a good reproduction of the live performance.

By the same process almost all music involving electrically amplified instruments is artificially mixed so that even those who were in the studio cannot relate the recorded event to the original event.  There can be no worthwhile objective of trying to reproduce the 'original' sound.  This cannot be done and indeed the original sound cannot be identified.

But I think we are agreed that accurate reproduction of a correctly recorded acoustic event is a worthwhile objective.  More artificial 'events' and recordings just have to follow along.  I can still enjoy such recordings but there is no 'real thing' with which to compare them, so I don't.