Detailed sound? Real?

Electronic amplified music is undoubtedly just as real as acoustic music.

It is different though. Detail will vary but is a less prominent feature of amplified music in general compared to acoustic in general, that's all.

To be accurate, any discussion of what live music sounds like has to include the venue and listening location, which provides the context for how things sound. The same live music will sound different in different contexts. It will sound different still within the context of your listening room at home depending on how the recording was produced, how system is set up and where you listen from.

I think one has to acccept these facts first before any pursuit of the absolute sound can have any real meaning.

Mapman, I completely agree with you and the implications you mentioned. In my opinion, it is because of the myriad of differences in live venues, recording studios, listening rooms, etc., the pursuit of the absolute sound will always come up short. I tend to be in the same camp as Tvad and Mrtennis on this one.

If by "Absolute SOund" we mean a single kind of optimal sound that can always be achieved, then I agree that this is an unrealistic goal.

A realistic "absolute sound" to achieve is one where the basic nature of most any kind of recorded music of interest is delivered in a particular listening room in a manner that the listener almost always finds satisfying.

Amplified music requires one transducer to convert soundwaves into electrical current, another transducer to convert the electrical current back into soundwaves and an intervening system of electrical device(s) to relay the electrical signal between the two transducers. At our current level of technology, microphones do not pick up soundwaves the way the human ear/brain system does and loudspeakers don't radiate soundwaves the way instruments produce them. From this I conclude that amplified sound is fundamentally differ than unamplified sound. My point holds even if the original instrument is an electric instrument used with an amplifier.

Several people have mentioned that unless you were at the recording venue during the performance that you really can't say what the recording should sound like. I would take it farther and say you would have to have been at the mastering session where the engineer, artist and producer finalized the recording's sound to have an accurate reference for how your home system should sound. Clearly this raises the additional issue of whether the recording is accurate to the sound of the original performance.

The main flaw with the pursuit of the absolute sound as detailed in the magazine of the same name is how they minimize the effect of the recording process. No matter what you do on the home reproduction side, you can never compensate for the inherently destructive nature of the recording process. Which is not to say that you can't have high quality, good fidelity, pleasant sounding home audio reproduction.