The real truth about recordings

I would say that the listener's choice of speaker and other components may be comparable to the choice of where in a concert hall the listener sits/where the microphones are placed. 

Not at all ...

You forgot that  all components and the speakers sound such and such in SPECIFIC  room acoustic conditions... ( acoustic material content, geometry, size, treatments and acoustic devices  etc no room sound the same at all  and serve speskers in the same way )

And you forgot how the electronic design gear choices will modify the sound...

Of course, the more neutral the listening room/speaker interface, the closer the system will be to reproducing

 No room is neutral... And no speakers sound the same if we change room parameters... Neutral is a relative convenient word we use for specific ears/brain experience of ONE owner... It will not be neutral on the same level for another users  even in the same room ...

To summarize, it’s throwing out the baby with the bath water to conclude that accurate reproduction is somehow a false or unattainable goal with all recordings, just because it doesn’t apply to some.

The point in the article is not about or against the fact that some recording are less or more natural sounding...

It is about the fact that in live event for acoustic evident reason , the difference in location of the mics ,their chosen type is one event and the ears of the listener located somewhere at a live event is another event , they cannot ever be the same acoustic event...

More than that there is no alleged perfect reproduction by recording being equal to all possible location of the listeners at a live event but add to that the alleged reproduction through a system playback in your room acoustic is in fact an acoustic translation ( an act of creation then in the best case or an act of destruction ) for your specific unique ears/brain... there is no exact reproduction in this chain of events...

High fidelity is a term used in the marketting of gear...

Then you throw the clear acoustics science  baby and keep the illusion of reproduction with  the electronic dirty waters... 😊

Very interesting article that correspond to my acoustic experiments in a way...

Thanks to the OP for this article EVERYONE must read and meditate... 😊

This say it all ...

Yet the experience of playing a record is best thought of not as an act of recreation but as an act of original creation. Even a recording of a live event—even if there was an experience in the real world that was captured on tape—what’s on the record is so far removed from what happened then and there that it makes sense to think of it as something new.

quoting Evan Eisenberg’s book The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography: "In the great majority of cases," JA quoted, "there is no original musical event that a record records or reproduces."

We must understood that any recording trade-off choices by mic type and location choices among other things dont capture the original acoustic event but a perspective on it.... Then at the end of the playback chain , your system/room TRANSLATE acoustically for the specific ears/brain of the owner the first acoustic trade off perspective... There is no pure high fidelity REPRODUCTION... It is marketing not acoustics ... It is acoustic TRANSLATION with a loss and also with a gain because of the selected accentuation of some aspects of sounds picked by the recording engineer and also which fact is forgotten some trade-off specific set of acoustic choices from the owner room/system tool for this playback translation ...

Finally, the crux of the issue. We audiophiles and serious music listeners are most satisfied (whether we know it or not) not when engineers intervene as little as possible but when they are most successful in pulling the wool over our eyes—when the illusion is complete. Often, that is best achieved with more intervention—more manipulation—not less.

Recording, then, is an act of artistic creation, starting with the earliest and most basic of audio-engineering tasks: positioning the microphones. Tom again: "A spaced-omni setup is probably among the most dependent on the listening aesthetic of the engineer and producer."

Here it is:

 https://www.stereophile.com/content/assessing-sonic-illusions