This is, IMHO, the central question posed by our collective obsession: "high fidelity." "Fidelity" to what, exactly? To the live performance, in the case of "classical" music (symphonies, chamber music, solo recitals)? That is, to an "original" that was performed on acoustic instruments, and not electrically amplified or mediated? If so, then what an audio system needs to re-create faithfully would seem to be instrumental timbre first of all, and then imaging: the acoustic illusion of a visual space. But, as several posters have already said, that imaging can in fact be far more vivid on a good system than it is live! The "copy" is "better" than the original!
Several posters have noted that the visual cues one has in a live concert need to be augmented at home, where they are strictly speaking absent; thus, an acoustic simulacrum is wanted to take their place. And yet, my wife, a pianist and musicologist, listens to live concerts with her eyes closed, and disdains listening at home to recorded music (admittedly, I don’t understand this, and I’m disappointed she has no interest in audiophilia).
As for excessive detail (bassoonists taking a breath, shuffling their feet, etc.), many of you know about the controversy created by Glenn Gould’s Bach recordings, complete with his audible "vocalizations"; many returned their LPs as defective when they heard those extra-musical sounds.
The philosopher Jean Beaudrillard has advanced a theory of our times that’s relevant here. He has argued that, for us "post-moderns," especially in America, reality is now dominated by "simulacra," by replicas of an unattainable or absent or even mythical and non-existent original. An American who sees Bavaria’s Neuschwanstein Castle for the first time is likely to relate to it as a copy of Disneyland’s Magic Castle, although, of course, that gets things backward. But who’s to say what is "backward"? The presumed original may disappoint compared to its copy; why reject that? In any case, one need not limit this sort of observation to the "post-modern." The Houses of Parliament in London are already simulacra: "Gothic" architecture several centuries too late, and on a scale that no Gothic architect would ever have imagined. Does that make them "fake"?
And what about music that was never "acoustic" to begin with? Rock, most Jazz and all electronic music was created via some of the same technologies that reproduce it at home. Remember when early stereo recordings artificially isolated instruments in one speaker or there other, or played with the "stereo effect" (consider the opening of Hendrix’s "Electric Landyland," just for example). Those electronic manipulations have their own thrill value, surely, which is often not negligible and entirely depend on the kinds of things, like vivid imaging, that only good audio equipment can reproduce.
Listening to music at home is just different than listening to it live. In some respects, of course, a home system does, and should aspire to emulate a close "reproduction" of that "original" performance. But in other ways, what’s possible at home far surpasses what one can get in even the best concert hall.
And finally, I’ve long been convinced that part of our passion as audiophiles has to do with a kind of awed delight that it’s possible to create, in our own homes, something that, in previous centuries, would have required the resources of royalty. To convincingly create the sense of being present to a soundstage on which sits an entire symphony orchestra in one’s living room is, for my money, one of the very best gifts science and technology has given us.
