You’re right to be judging sonic qualities by listening to acoustic music. Large-scale classical, chamber, quartets, jazz can present proper tonal qualities, dynamics, and nuances not found in electric or amplified music. I listen to mainly classical music and also attend live concerts which helps confirm realistic sound from my home system.
So…for filmic qualities we should only be watching surveillance camera footage?
No one denies the need for nuance in hifi systems. But let’s not oversimplify things.
Music is a very general category that includes live, recorded, multi-track, synthesized, etc. The notion that the "sonic qualities" of music are paradigmatically represented by live acoustic music is like saying all food should be eaten raw or that all films should simply be surveillance camera footage.
Painting moved past simple portraits and landscapes to impressionism, cubism, etc. -- and, to tell the truth, even those simpler pictorial genres had a helluva a lot of interpretation and selection already built in. Any architect who built a concert hall already knew they were participating in the construction of sound. Same thing with any violin builder. The challenge is to create a technology that is expressive enough for the artist to communicate their ideas. It's not, and never was, about "realism" if that means some kind of simple isomorphism.
The notion that sonic representation is necessarily sonic degradation betrays a profound naiveté about what art even is. To use it as a guide is foolhardy.
