Sorry for the long post, but I have one more reflection to add. Besides my wife's love of attending live concerts (with eyes closed) and her dislike of listening at home to recordings, we have a close family friend who founded a youth orchestra in our area and teaches children, and sometimes their parents (for instance, me!), to play an instrument. He is, frankly, a rather mediocre musician himself. But he would much rather play music badly than listen to music played well. As far as I can tell, he almost never listens to recordings.
I'm not sure what my point is in relating this, but it has something to do with the question posed by the OP. If audio systems can actually produce an illusion of acoustic space that is more vivid than what is experienced live, is that a good thing or not? Maybe the answer depends on why you listen to music. In my experience, musicians listen differently than do music lovers--never mind "audiophiles."
Let me illustrate with an anecdote. A good friend's father founded a major European string quartet (and played first violin), and I visited him at his summer home in Switzerland when I was in grad school. I'd just come from Zagreb, then Yugoslavia, where I'd been very taken with a performance of a string quartet by Stjepan Sulic, a Croatian composer who is not well known. I told my friend's father about it, and promised to find him a recording if I could. "Don't do that," he replied, "just get me the score." How many music lovers do you know who would actually rather see the score of an unfamiliar piece than hear a performance of it? And yet, a performance, of course, is always going to be an "interpretation"; the score is the thing itself. So if we really value the composition, "the music," perhaps we should learn to read music, and to play an instrument. I love wine--so much, in fact, that I've learned to make wine with a few similarly passionate friends. Our wine isn't very good; it's not worth what it costs us to make it. But the experience of doing so augments our appreciation of what we drink.
What I'm trying to say is that "audiophilia" is not the same thing as a love of music. That's pretty obvious, I guess, and is often enough pointed out. But usually, it's pointed out in a judgmental way: "real music lovers" don't obsess over tweaks, etc. etc. I reject that judgment. We value the thrills we get from uncompromising audio reproduction, irrespective of the music reproduced. Some of my favorite and most frequently played LPs and CDs are musically banal, but terrifically well recorded. I'm a little embarrassed by that fact, but I hope honest enough to admit it.
