I neglected to include the following: I very much appreciate and concur with the feelings of Art Dudley and Herb Reichert, that "forward musical momentum", touch, and full color saturation of instrumental timbre is extremely important in the reproduction of music. But of what value are those if Tony Rice’s guitar, Jerry Douglas’ dobro, and Alison Krauss’ vocals have had their color "temperature" (to make a photographic analogy) changed? Or if the sound is so lacking in transparency as to make the instruments difficult to hear? I did however include their criteria of scale (I call it instrumental size and height).
But I left out my number two priority (second only to lack of timbral coloration), that of immediacy. If you’ve heard a direst-to-disk LP and/or Decca/London cartridge, you know what I mean by that. A "startling alive", fully fleshed out, 3-dimensional human being(s) standing right in front of you in the room. So real you feel you could reach out and touch him, her, or them. That’s for small-scale music, obviously. For large scale, it is the massive presence of an orchestra in a concert hall or cathedral, all its members hitting the opening notes of a composition with enough force to knock your head back!
I recall reading Pearson discussing transparency, and was very surprised to see him say about a system that it was transparent in the same way a live instrument is transparent. If you're like me, you might be thinking "Wait, if a live instrument were transparent, you wouldn't hear (see) it". A system, and recording, are transparent TO the original; the original can't be transparent!