Musicians in your living room vs. you in the recording hall?

Directionality is a really complex thing. Definitely useful. I can walk around in the total dark and sense walls (not very accurately but I can manage at a snails pace) - small obstacles are beyond my hearing acuity.

Below 2000 Hz we use the time arrivals of the sound at each ear to work out left right position. Above 2000 Hz we use the relative loudness of the sound (as the head blocks out frequencies above 6000 Hz very effectively (even for small angles off axis like 30 degrees). For the above reasons I believe phase is very important. If high frequencies are delayed by your typical Minimum phase filter or MQA then imaging won’t be as precise because location cues arrive later than they should.

Front, back and up down directionality is more complex. We use the floor reflections which cause comb filtering to work out height. We also use the phase distortion caused by our pinea to work out front and back and to a less extent up down.

Anyway, like a dog, we will obviously tilt our head or move side to side to better deploy our location capabilities especially as high frequencies are so heavily attenuated or blocked by our head.

I would say we can detect the direction of a sound to within two or three inches from 20 feet away given enough sonic info (won’t work for a 100 Hz tone where directionality is challenged)

There are four dimensions for a given space. The three physical dimensions - length, width and depth x, y, z are determined for a live recording by reverberant decay, room reflections, echo and other acoustic properties of the recording space picked up by the microphones. The fourth dimension - time - allows the human brain to integrate the physical parameters to calculate velocities and locations, dx/dt, etc.

Squirrels, by contrast, have very poor integration skills.

If time was not real man would have to create it. 🤗

**** I am not sure any composer (or few) wrote their music with a view to judging it in a concert hall ****

They certainly did! Composers did/do, in fact, make orchestration (instrumentation) choices and make dynamic level indications taking into consideration how the blend of certain instruments or groups of instruments will be affected by the distance to the listener. A simple and common example of this is the difference between the sound of, for instance, a flute and a clarinet playing a unison line as heard from a seat in the hall vs the sound of same as heard by a mic a couple of feet away. That unison line, when well executed and heard from a seat in the hall can have a unique character and color; as if one single (and different) instrument is playing, introducing a new instrumental color to the orchestral palette. When heard up close that same unison musical line will sound like two separate and discreet musical lines at least to some degree no matter how well executed by the players. The musical effect will be very different. Great composers (orchestrators) are keenly aware of these effects.

What happened to the idea of striving to have our systems reproduce what is in the recording? If we setup and tune our systems with the goal in mind of the musicians always sounding as if they are in our living rooms, what happens when the recording was deliberately made to sound with a mid hall perspective? Would we not, by equipment choice and setup, be suppressing the ambient cues in the recording; iow, a distortion? The reverse would also be true.

It's also worthy of note; every great venue, in history, was designed/constructed with reverberation/Sabine effects/ambiance in mind, even before the builders knew what to call it.  Whether good or bad, every room/venue has a sound.    One will hear reverberation outdoors, as well, in areas with trees, buildings, mountains or cliffs, nearby(and- given a loud enough source).   If one wants to accurately recreate an event: ambient sound recovery = realism(and, as mentioned, "ESSENTIAL", regarding that goal).    Again- tastes may vary(facts don't).