I'm around a lot of live music, including right in my home or listening room. Anyone that says you can't reproduce live sound, to the point you can't tell the difference, on an audio system, is making too broad of a generalization. I've never heard a symphony orchestra reproduced convincingly, but it is absolutely practical to convincingly reproduce a piano, a flute, a violin, or even a full drum kit. In the case of a flute, I've had the musician playing along with herself on a studio-recorded CD while she was standing between my speakers. It wasn't a quite a perfect match, mostly because the recording wasn't all that great (I suspect the mic), but it was very, very close.
A drum kit takes one hell of an audio system to reproduce correctly. Especially cymbals. Most tweeters suck in power handling. I've only heard two speakers *ever* that got cymbals just right, and I bought one of them. But it is possible to do a very convincing reproduction of my wife's DW drum kit.
The problem is that I usually don't want a real, actual drum kit reproduced in my listening room. It's too loud. When my wife gets all worked up passionately playing I don't even want to stand nearby. I want to be about 20 feet away. It needs to be a very large room to sound pleasant. A flute in my listening room, yes. Maybe a sax (a sax can be very loud), certainly a piano (we have one), also a cello. A rock band? No.
Amplified live music is usually terrible. You're usually listening to a PA system no one here would have in their listening room. Even the local jazz scene has become terrible. They mic everything, and pump them up with hundreds of watts of PA. Yuck. There is exactly one place we've found where we can listen to unamplified acoustic jazz. (It's awesome).
I don't expect my home audio system to sound like a live performance, because I seldom play it that loud. Live and realistic are two different concepts, I think. I expect a drum kit to sound absolutely realistic, but I don't often want to sound live.
A drum kit takes one hell of an audio system to reproduce correctly. Especially cymbals. Most tweeters suck in power handling. I've only heard two speakers *ever* that got cymbals just right, and I bought one of them. But it is possible to do a very convincing reproduction of my wife's DW drum kit.
The problem is that I usually don't want a real, actual drum kit reproduced in my listening room. It's too loud. When my wife gets all worked up passionately playing I don't even want to stand nearby. I want to be about 20 feet away. It needs to be a very large room to sound pleasant. A flute in my listening room, yes. Maybe a sax (a sax can be very loud), certainly a piano (we have one), also a cello. A rock band? No.
Amplified live music is usually terrible. You're usually listening to a PA system no one here would have in their listening room. Even the local jazz scene has become terrible. They mic everything, and pump them up with hundreds of watts of PA. Yuck. There is exactly one place we've found where we can listen to unamplified acoustic jazz. (It's awesome).
I don't expect my home audio system to sound like a live performance, because I seldom play it that loud. Live and realistic are two different concepts, I think. I expect a drum kit to sound absolutely realistic, but I don't often want to sound live.