How close to the real thing?

Any way that you look at it, High power matched with high effiency speakers will produce dynamics. And back to the ops original question, Dynamics go along way toward making a convincing presentation.
and Fas42, I have found on large scale music that room size does matter in reproducing that large sound stage. Maybe its just me not figuring out in 30 years how to set up a system in a smaller room, but I definately get a wider more natural presentation on large scale music in a larger room. Granted, the largest room I have experience in is about 20x30 ft (6.25x9.25 meters), but on large scale music, I have definately experienced a larger sound stage. My current room is 14.5x22 ft and it does a wonderful job with small scale recordings, but I haven't been able to duplicate some of the large scale stuff that I have heard in the past with the same recordings.
Cone mass & power also matter in larger rooms. If I understood what Weseixas was saying?

Hello Timlub,

Yes that is correct...

regards,

Timlub, as notes of interest I have had almost the same number of years as yourself wrestling with this bizarre and at times excrutiatingly frustrating "addiction", and also my room is almost a perfect size match to yours.

For me, when the system is working correctly, i.e., low levels of distortion, the auditory experience is that the end wall completely dissolves and the room becomes attached to the location where the recording was made, the "window" experience, I guess. If a large scale orchestral, then exactly if one were sitting in a private stall in the concert hall. It is no longer that of a musical event in a room, the sensation is that the whole house has somehow been transported and is sitting next to where the musical event is happening, and is a mere extension to the "soundstage". Very hard to get to happen, but very much worth it!

Frank

Hi Frank,
My back wall also dissapears. I get a soundstage from my speakers to maybe 10ft behind my speakers and they are 6.5 ft from my back wall. My speakers are 106 inches apart and on some recordings, I do get a soundstage extended a couple of feet past my speakers in width, But never can I take an orchestra that its natural width would be say 25 feet and get my system to reproduce this. Within these limits, I get Outstanding instrument placement on width as well as depth. If anyone has any ideas on how to improve...
I'm all ears.

Timlub, glad to hear how you're doing! If anyone here could see my current setup they would laugh hilariously, it looks a mess... Speakers roughly 2 ft from back wall, about 6 ft apart.

What I learned to concentrate on, is eliminating all, and I mean ALL, unpleasant distortion from the system, and this can be very, very difficult to do. Everything matters, as they say, and if you don't fix everything then you are making it very hard to get it to happen for yourself.

How low should the distortion be? A simple test, when the system is working flat out on a "difficult", or any recording, is that a speaker completely disappears. That is, standing a foot away directly in front of one (left or right) speaker and in line with the tweeter (or high end reproducer) your ear/brain cannot pick that the sound is coming from the drivers. "Believe it or not ..." as I think someone once said ... :-)

Why this can happen is that the ear/brain compresses the loud sound, rather than the system. This is what happens naturally; how else can a player in an orchestra tolerate the sound level around him if this didn't happen ...

Frank