"I am there" vs. "They are here"

Zaikes (yikes) very well worded ! You sound like an English major ! (no pun intended)
I catch your drift about the recording "standardization".
This post is very interesting because it is exactly what we deal with all the time, the relaxing emotional connection so to speak, is the primary goal after all the buying, selling, trading, upgrading, downgrading, tuning and frustrations.
Audiogon and all our knowledge with trials, errors and sucess stories really help a lot towards "sifting through" the sometimes difficult journey towards musical nirvana.
I would like to see a comprehensive "Hi-end Users Guide Book" for ultimate mixing and matching components and cables published, instead of class A,B,C, etc. and I'm not bashing the monthly mags, so don't anyone go jumpin me about their usefullness, I find them "entertaining".
Maybe this seems a bit absurd, but we all don't live in a city with "Highend Valley" down the road to be able to audition our favorite stuff (i'm one of them)
I'm still "here" !

Sorry Rnm4 and Aroc that I might not have made myself entirely clear about what the shorthand "They are there" catchphrase represents for me. The "there" in question is the space the original performance was recorded in, while "they" of course are the performers.

One benchmark criteria for a high fidelity recording (in the sense Harry Pearson described in coining 'The absolute sound') is that it perceptually succeed in capturing/transmitting some sense of the performance acoustic and the players' relation to it/interaction with it - "They are there". All I'm saying is that to finish this job we must include the proper function of the playback system. Again, of the conventional choices listed in the title of this thread, "They are here" (the performers are in your room) is wrong, and "You are there" (you are in the performance space) is impossible, so a modicum of "They are there" (the performers are in the performance space, with you observing through the imperfect 'window') is what we can actually achieve/ought to strive for. "They are there" hinges upon the regrettably accutely limited ability of the recording process to capture the total effect; the best we can attempt with the replay system is to try to avoid fatally further obscuring whatever degree the recording accomplishes that goal.

Anyway, I've gotten a lot heavier here than the whole topic really bears scrutinizing. This was just something that had dawned on me recently during listening: it's not "they're here", it's not "I'm there", it's "they're there". Just a simple distilled concept, no biggie, but it's more satisfying and less cognitively dissonant to me than the dichotomous choice of the other two. And Rx8man, were I an English major, I hope I'd be a lot easier to read than I fear I probably am... :-)

I have a 7' Steinway B sitting behind my speaker plane, set as a 7.5' nearfield triangle. Whereas "I'm there" somewhat often with orchestral sources, all too often pianists (and their jazz trios) "are here". I can even jiggle with my separate Pass Aleph P gain controls to have a chanteuse slide up closer and lean into the piano belly as I imagine ME 'comping her! At this point WHERE am I?

If she's a great looker, I'd be crawlin on her too !!
At that point, I'd "be there" !!
They'd probably throw me "off the stage" !!
At that moment, I'd be "outta there" !!!!

Perhaps 'you are there' will become possible with properly-done multichannel audio.