How close to the real thing?


Recently a friend of mine heard a Chopin concert in a Baptist church. I had told him that I had gone out to RMAF this year and heard some of the latest gear. His comment was that he thinks the best audio systems are only about 5% close to the real thing, especially the sound of a piano, though he admitted he hasn't heard the best of the latest equipment.

That got me thinking as I have been going to the BSO a lot this fall and comparing the sound of my system to live orchestral music. It's hard to put a hard percentage on this kind of thing, but I think the best systems capture a lot more than just 5% of the sound of live music.

What do you think? Are we making progress and how close are we?
peterayer
Waryn,

Ever Heard of the practice of medicine .. yes they are still in the dark there 2 my friend...

Regards,
Frank ,

I hope Kirkus have you figured out, this way at least one of us can follow along ... :) :)
Atmasphere, I noticed that the output impedance of one of your amps is about 4 ohms, and I assume that impedance is not perfectly linear across all ten octaves. So, isn't that high output impedance going to affect the audible frequency response of the amp-speaker combination, and in ways that vary with every different loudspeaker's impedance curve?
Mapman says:

"Well, the whole negative feedback issue has been beaten to death pretty thoroughly already in other threads.

My conclusion is that it is just one of many design and execution factors that affect results depending on how well it is executed."

I couldn't agree more.