@ieales --
I doubt I’ve ever moved my head 8-10 inches either side at a live performance. Or stood up.
But I gather you’re not handed the same, specific seat that says "Reserved to Mr./Ms. [insert name]" as the one and only place to have a proper concert experience, in fact there’s a range seats centered to the stage that will be quite excellent sound-wise. Once seated, if that’s what you do, you could easily move your head about a foot shifting occasionally from one side in the chair to the other, and even so it’s hardly relevant with regard to any changes in sound. If you believe there is something tells me the you’re projecting the head-in-vise experience from your home set-up.
Properly set up and integrated, HiFi can do an amazing job at recreating a performance bet it Joe Pass playing acoustic alone, The Who or The London Phil. The trade off, due to physics, is the sweet spot is somewhat constricted.
No domestic set-up I’ve heard has come even fairly close to resembling a live acoustic concert, not to say some set-ups aren’t more successful in their approximation here than others, which is also to say: the effort isn’t futile. Let’s not fool ourselves though - the trade off is the recreation itself; you’re not there at the live event, you’re not going to fully experience it as such. A surplus in mage specificity, to a certain point, takes away from the holistic experience of music and in turn makes it more about something that’s supposed to impress sonically rather than musically, but that’s also about frequency response and the target curve at play.
In a live performance, if one has the ability to wander about, one will find there are gross variations in the sonic field, sometimes in as little as a foot.
Isn’t this the audiophile tendency to miss the forest for the trees? Just sit down and enjoy the damn music. A few changes in seating position shouldn’t make it a hit or miss; you still get to experience the totality of the event, something your home set-up can’t recreate - even perfectly positioned right smack in the middle.
It’s my experience that a wide sweet spot never elicits comments like "Joe Pass is sitting RIGHT THERE!"
Wide, narrow - to me it’s finding the proper balance somewhere in between here.