The "same as live" concept is irrelevant, except you can shoot for timbre and room feeling I suppose (I’ve mixed and recorded hundreds of live concerts from Richie Havens to the Baltimore Consort), and "black backgrounds" exist in a vacuum only. We really have to ban the "black background" term…really…perhaps the most overused and patently useless audio bullshit term since it appeared a few years ago. Maybe "noiseless" is OK…still…the world has ambient sound in it, and "hearing a venue" sort of makes my point. It does. Trust me (!). Is an image stable when you move your head? No, it’s not, but again…live images as a reference are often vague unless you’re sitting on the stage with the musicians (I argue this point often). Good hifi lets the results of the recording engineer’s panning (and mic placement) or lack of same shine through…I get it (and, I do it). I also think great music makes any decent system "disappear," and I have piles of actual acoustic instruments I can play that are within several feet of my "listening" audio rig (and surrounding my home recording rig) and I know what they sound like…I can make un-miked live natural wooden acoustic instruments distort in your face (uh…is that a capacitor or your MAMA), and they come from a "black background" only in somebody’s imagination.
