What is a high end stereo SUPPOSED to sound like?

I suppose it all boils down to how expensive to achieve musically satisfying?

The answer of course is: it all depends...on a lot of things!

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Spot on about how the highs and lows grab you when you first enter a "high end" showroom. It's akin to what you see when evaluating TVs: settings that look great but permanently burn out the rods and cones in the back of your eye if you look long enough.

On another thread I stated just how much I'm now enjoying my CDP just by swapping out some ICs. Enough to stop listening to my iMac. All the little things you allude to besides the highs and lows that grab your attention come into play now. Gone is the indistinct, the vague, the missing, replaced by all the pertinent cues that make it seem all the more realistic. My speaker 'seems' to go lower though I know it doesn't. It just now has all the cues necessary to complete the picture of an upright bass, realistically.

Ambient cues like hands gently tapping and strumming along on instruments,
musicians preparing to play as they adjust their hands on their instruments, entering lightly before playing forcefully. There are times now where I swear I can almost discern body language or position as they play.

Spooky times indeed.

I've gotten to where, due to my listening room, I prefer these type of cues and sounds to whether or not I have that giant recreation of an orchestra's venue. Even from an orchestra, one can catch these kinds of cues, making it more convincing, for me. The rest I can fill out in my mind, overlooking the obvious.

All the best,
Nonoise

I agree that highs and lows are nice but overrated. :-)

Most of what is going on in music occurs elsewhere. Highs and lows can be the icing on the cake but not the initial key to basic enjoyment.

I do find that a large 3-D soundstage along with the rest can help with clutter and enable the listener to better discern what is going on in a more detailed and lifelike manner.

OF course, its all relative. ITs similar to where a smaller HD TV with 3-D might suffice in a smaller room or watching from a closer distance whereas a larger screen is needed generally to see the same details from more of a distance.

The one point that high end really just means expensive is important. I don't know what just any expensive audio gear should sound like? It is not really a great question. What should an expensive car be like, fast comfortable, made of carbon fiber, etc all that matters about the car is what matters to you. You get the point.
The price of the gear, people are trying to elaborate on, which produces the perfect or ideal sound of is sort of irrelevant. The passionate answers are really answering a different question. That question is what is the perfect audio system. It was answered 5 and 6 decades ago with the term hi-fi. If you don't know it means highly like the original.
I happen to agree with Elizabeth it doesn't have to be an exact match, it can sound a little euphonic. that's what makes me happy, and that's all that matters.

Hi guys - I wanted to chime in on the conversation about recording spaces for a moment that Bryon and Mapman are having. I don't think that anyone has made the point here that one would almost never want their music to sound like the actual recording space, if we are assuming that this space is a recording studio. These are very dead environments that do not enhance the music whatsoever, meaning how the music actually sounds in that space as it is actually being played. What these types of rooms do enhance is the recording engineer's ability to make the recording sound exactly how he wants it to (which very often has nothing to do with how the musicians want it to sound, by the way). This point we have discussed on other threads, but it is certainly applicable here.

A related point, which has also been discussed on other threads, is that in general, musicians normally choose fidelity to the performance vs. fidelity to the recording of that performance (a whole bunch of recordings out there really suck, even if the performances are excellent, and why the heck would you want to be faithful to such a recording??). I think Elizabeth touches on this when she speaks of "slighty euphonic coloring." Most musicians want their systems to sound as lifelike as possible (timbres first and foremost), as opposed to trying to eliminate all "distortions." A whole lot of folks who attempt to do the latter end up with systems that throw the baby out with the bathwater, or lose the forest for the trees. Neither the recording nor the system it is played back on will ever be an exact match to the performance, as others have correctly pointed out here.