TONE

Some representations are more pleasing than others even if they are not "realistic."

I like impressionism more than hyperrealism in painting because it conveys something meaningful with the way it represents.

My search for the sound I was looking for in audio was helped somewhat by looking for realism, and also helped by looking *past* realism.

In other words, "true" has many meanings, and "simulation" is only one of them.

@chayro ,
"I spent many years in the recording business and I know that most recordings are eq’d and heavily processed to achieve the sound that the person paying the bills wants to hear."


That’s seems about right. Everyone else is just an employee with little say in the final product.

It seems as if most artists don’t bother to question sonic decisions made by those higher up.

I can’t think of very many who did.

Maybe the Velvet Underground (probably drove their engineers mad with deliberate overload), Dylan, Neil Young, Kate Bush, Steely Dan, Dire Straits and a few others.

"Commercial music" or very polpular one  is heavily processed even voices and with voice on a good system it may sound unnatural....

"I've always considered starting a thread in which we list some recordings that we believe accurately convey the true sound of musical instruments, but like so many threads, they just turn into arguments and lectures, so I dropped the idea".

@chayro you had a good topic idea . Some threads on this forum do manage to remain  interesting,  informative and respectful. 
In regard to your recording industry experience, did  the processing affect all music genres equally or were some more egregious than others? Pop/Rock versus Jazz/classical for instance. 
Charles 

Make your own music recordings! Borrow or rent a pair of good mics and a reel-to-reel recorder, and ask a musician friend (you do have them, right?) if you can record a live performance. Once the tape is rolling, listen intently to the music and the sound. Then listen to the recording at home, comparing the sound you heard with the sound your system is producing.

Another great thing to record is the human voice. We are all very familiar with that sound, and any "vowel" coloration (as J. Gordon Holt put it) will be glaringly obvious. WARNING: Most loudspeakers fail this demanding test. The QUAD ESL (introduced in 1957!) excelled in reproducing singing voices, setting a standard few other speakers to this day can match.

If you are new to live recording, you may need to take a few stabs at it before you seem to have captured the sound fairly accurately. The catch-22 is that the only way to evaluate the tape is to listen to it on a system, the very thing you are trying to determine the tonal accuracy of!

If that sounds like more than you want to take on, use recordings known for having life-like tonal characteristics. Known superior recordings in that regard are those on the Water Lily Records. Try A Meeting On The River, featuring the guitar playing of Ry Cooder.