How can a system be judged with highly processed, non acoustic music?

On the first Stereophile Test CD they have a track where JG Holt reads from a Stereophile and is recorded in mono by about 15 different microphones including Shures, AKGs, Neumans, Telefunkens, etc. It’s not hard to tell when the microphone changes.

So I would say that what you are doing is making your system sound most natural to you. It may not sound most natural to someone else who uses different minimalist acoustic recordings to determine natural.

What you just said about mic is right but you miss the important point about what is the difference between natural non electrically amplified instrument and voices timbre recognition in the database set of our brain species...

Natural human voice listening is the better test for an audio system....unamplified piano is good...Because of the sum of all the subtle cues there is associated with them...

Electronic music is the worst choice to determine more objectively if a system is good or not in a comparison implicating many people...

We dont speak about OUR  taste here we speak  acoustic...

 Anybody could prefer moog electronical music over opera singing for sure....Saying that is saying nothing....

The old J Gordon Holt mic story made me think some more. This whole listening/evaluating thing is incredibly complex. Nothing new, known about it since like forever. What's hard is trying to put into words what I've been doing this whole time.   

It comes down I think to pattern recognition. Everything has its own unique sonic signature or fundamental character, whatever you want to call it. Like, when you hear someone's voice, anyone you have heard before, you know who it is. Some of them, a wife or mother for example, you will know even coming to you far off in the distance, through a storm, over a cell phone, no problem. So we can recognize these things even when distorted all kinds of different ways.   

The way I see it, what we are doing when evaluating a system is not so much trying to say it sounds like it did originally. We can't ever really know what that was. Not exactly. We can't ever really know all the stuff that happened before it went down on tape. That is kind of like mom yelling in the storm, we can sort of tell the wind was blowing, rain, etc but we have to sort of put that aside. That part is nothing we can do anything about. The recording is what the recording is. All we can do is try and evaluate our end of it.  

So like I said hard to explain. But I think we are trying to listen for those patterns that are "true" to the whatever it was, and then do something very demanding. We have to somehow put aside all the many different aspects that came before our system, because we can do nothing about them. But then focus on the aspects that come after, because that is our system and that we can do something about.  

Learning to sort those out. One of the bigger keys to the kingdom.

@frogman we are on the same page. Hardly throwing in the towell. Impossible with my growing microphone collection. A steady diet of unamplified music in reverberant space, captured simply ( a great three channel mixer, anyone ? Rudy Bozak get busy . My mentor and i are currently discussing why a particularly fine Earthworks microphone, while fine for a stereo pair high up for ambience, is not accurate enough for loudspeaker production quality control…
i am a student…..but i make my own references…..
i don’t go looking for timbre in an ELP piano…..

So like I said hard to explain. But I think we are trying to listen for those patterns that are "true" to the whatever it was, and then do something very demanding. We have to somehow put aside all the many different aspects that came before our system, because we can do nothing about them. But then focus on the aspects that come after, because that is our system and that we can do something about.

Learning to sort those out. One of the bigger keys to the kingdom

i agree...

My only added point is our brain data base is heavily programmed to recognized timbre voices from all origin in closed or open space... Survival mode....

My experience is the same as frogman..

My experience has been that building a system that best reproduces unprocessed acoustic music allows processed music to sound best.

@wolf_garcia. Yeah, stereotyping guitar brands with a particular type of sound is ultimately treacherous as hell, but I still can't help but do it. I also gotta say that me and the wife have more than our share of steel string acoustics in the house.  Damn, her Everett sounds lovely! And in earlier days I spent an inordinate amount of time at McCabe's Guitar Shop and similar joints, taking guitars off the wall to sample.

At any rate, I think of a Gibson acoustic as sounding dry and midrangey --  a sound particularly designed not to get in the way of vocals. A Gibson L-00 (yeah, it's tiny) suits this sound to a T, as do many Gibby dreads. Martins, particularly dreadnaughts, sound big and complex -- made for propelling bluegrass bands. 

I've never heard or played an Olson Guitar, but I've played the other brands you mention, and sound-wise they all generally hew to the Martin sound. And  oh yes, I truly love the Froggy Bottom and the Santa Cruz.

@mglik -- I gotta tell ya' that pianos' sounds can vary remarkably by both brand and size. Again, I'm typecasting here to beat the band, but Steinways tend to sound clangy and Baldwins tend to sound mellow. Bosendorfer inhabits the tonal spot between them.