Frank, Kijanki, some very good questions. I'll do my best to answer them briefly. I'll start with Frank's discussion of playback at the recording site. I have had to record myself, or have a professional record me, more times than I care to count. More than a few times, I have convinced the engineer (always when it was a personal friend) to experiment with me, using both an analog and a digital set-up. I assure you, there are clearly heard differences between what is heard in the hall live, what is on the analog recording, and what is on the digital recording. It's a fun experiment to do, listening to the differences in timbre, and to the sense of space, or as audiophiles would have it, soundstaging and imaging and bloom and other such terms.
As far as orchestral recording goes, what I was thinking of was the difference between say recordings from the 50's and 60's, the so-called "golden age" of orchestral recording, and the way it is done digitally today. In the golden age, pretty much all of the best labels just hung a couple of mikes up out in the hall (or in the case of Mercury, high above the orchestra, usually about 15 to 20 feet, if I remember correctly). There was then very little done to the recording in the way of mixing, in the modern sense. Done in this way, the recording sounds about as close as it can get to what it actually sounds like to a live audience member sitting in the best seats in the hall.
Today, in a typical orchestral recording session, there may be as many as twenty mikes onstage, as well as overhead. Almost never are any placed out in the hall anymore. These mikes are much closer to the instruments than they should be, and then all of these separate tracks have to be mixed, which is almost never done on site (with the reference to the live sound). The resulting mix is therefore more what the engineer thinks sounds good (often even the conductor is not involved anymore, except on site) rather than a re-creation of what the performance actually sounded like in the space it was recorded in. You lose much more of the sense of a real space on this type of recording. And this is not to even go into how many edits are done nowadays compared to in the past. Often, what you are listening to on a modern orchestra recording has no real resemblance to any single take that was actually done. This is one reason why many people complain that modern orchestras do not sound as "musical" somehow as the older ones did - the "life" they are missing has indeed been taken out by the process. The average symphonic recording nowadays has hundreds of edits on it.
So to the playback - on a well-done recording, tape hiss is all but inaudible, and if one takes good care of their LP's, one can get dozens if not hundreds of plays from many of them without ever hearing a pop or crackle. Other times, these things are very audible; sometimes the pressing was bad and there is nothing one can do about it. Regardless, this is merely surface noise. I personally will put up with this if it means that I get a more accurate (meaning lifelike) representation/resolution of the sound of the instruments and voices I am listening to, and a better sense of the space that they are in (which, of course, very much affects their performance, which will change in subtle ways in a different venue on a tour, for example). Analog recording captures these things so much better than digital recording does - this is easily demonstrated on any decent system. There is no mistaking the difference between the best orchestral recordings of the golden age, and the ones done today that may have much less surface noise, but sound so much more characterless in comparison (speaking of the recording, of course, not the performance).
